DR. ALBERT SCHWEITZER'S

ESCHATOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION

OF THE LIFE OF JESUS

An Appraisal of its Truth and Significance

Henry Alien Rodgers, A. B., B. D.

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at

the University of Edinburgh

1948

FOREWORD

To submit a thesis on Albert Schweitzer at the present time may

seem rather superfluous. During the past year, three new books deal­

ing with him have appeared. One, Prophet in the Wilderness, by Herman

Hagedorn, tells the story of his life in a popular way. Another,

Albert Schweitzer: the Man and his Mind, by George Seaver, aims at

being a definitive biogrpphy. And the third, Albert Schweitzer, an

Anthology, edited by Charles K. Joy, gives the more important excerpts

from his works. But none of these deals directly with the subject of

this thesis, which aims not to Dresent the story of his life, nor yet

to understand the genius of his original thought - he himself doess

this in My Life and Thought, and so have others - but to study one

phase of his work, his eschatological interpretation of the life of

Jesus, and to come to conclusions about its validity and value. So

far as the writer can discover, nobody has ever attempted the exhaus­

tive treatment which it deserves. This is not to say, of course,

that no scholar has ever reached a judgaant on Schweitzer's work.

The opposite is the case. No really thorough scholar since his time

dares to discuss the life of Jesus without taking into account the

eschatological theory. But most are content to do so with a passing

reference or at most a f»w pages on the subject. This thesis has no

theory of its own to put forward, but gives its Undivided attention

to Schweitzer's views and their consequences. This is the original

contribution it seeks to make to human knowledge.

If at times it has been found necessary to disagree with Dr.

Schweitzer's views, no disrespect is intended to the great personality

iii

mho is such an outstanding example of uhristian self-sacrifice. It

will be remembered, however, that the Paris Missionary Society, when

it authorized him to go to Lambarene, extracted from him the promise

to be silent about his views on the life of Jesus, because it believed

them to be mistaken and dangerous. His service has been achieved in

spite of, irather than because of, the theories with which this thesis

deals.

The writer wishes to acknowledge his debt to many who have made

this study possible: first of all, to his parents, Mr. and Mrs, Henry

D. Rodgers, who brought him up in a uhristian home, and have supported

him with their interest, prayers, and financial assistance in all his

studies; to the Kev. J. Frederick Kitchen, jr., minister of the Jfourth

Presbyterian ohurch of Albany, N.Y., of which the writer became a mem­

ber during his formative years, and the Rev. Harry J. Swan, director

of religious education in the church, who first pointed the writer

toward the gospel ministry; to Professor William Lee of Albany College,

Oregon, and the Rev. Mortimer M. Stocker, then pastor of the First

Presbyterian uhurch there, who were used of God to help the writer

realize and accept his call to the ministry; to the president and

faculty of the San Francisco Theological Seminary, who gave him his

theological training, and especially to the Rev. Dr. Edward A. Wicher,

professor of flew Testament, who gave him his interest in New Testament

itudies| to Principal William A. Curtis of New College, who suggested%*

the subject of the present thesis and helpedA lay the foundation for it,

to Professors William Manson and James S. Stewart, who served as super­

visors during its preparation and offered valuable suggestions; to

Dr. Albert Schweitzer, whose original theories have proved a most

interesting and rewarding subject of study, and the many theological

writers, some of whose works are quoted, who have helped the writer

to reach his conclusions; and finally ̂ to the writer' s wife, T <trg>.

Elizabeth Kodgers, without whose patience, encouragement, and assist­

ance the work could never have been brought to a successful conclu­

sion t

British readers are asked to forgive any Americanisms of spelling,

expression, and the liKe, which may have slipped into the thesis due

to the writer's American background.

Edinburgh, May, 1948. /TftWH' W-'*&&U*9

0 4

TABLE OF uONTENTS

ii

I. Schweitzer's Position 1

1. .sketch of his Life 1

2* Re*sum£ of Schweitzer's position ID

a. Dss Abendmahlsproblem 10

b. The Mystery of the Kingdom of God

c. The Quest of the Historical Jesus

d. Books on Paul

II. Schweitzer as Historian 44

1. History as a Theological Tool 4**

2. Schweitzer f s Historical Method Sf

3» More recent developments 81

a. Comparative religion 31

b. Form-Criticism §f

c. A new estimate of Schweitzer 100

III. Eschatology and Ethics 103

1. Schweitzer's conception of Jesus' eschato1 ogy 103

2. The Mysteries of the life of Jesus 131

a. The I^rstery of the Kingdom of God 132

b. The Hystery of the Messiahship 13£

c. The Ifystery of the Passion 147

3. Interim-ethic. ]_55

IV. Conclusion l/^

1. Positive value of Schweitzer's Contribution 171

2. Summary of results

IV. 2. a. Ihe Kingdom of God 179

b. The Messianic Consciousness 130

c. Interim-Hit hie s 182

<t. Other points 1%

Bibliography 136

1. Books by Albert Schweitzer 186

2. Books and articles about Schweitzer: 189

3. General works consulted 190

DR. ALBERT SCHrtEITZER'S

ESCHATOLOGICAL I^ERPRETATION

OF THE LIFE OF JESUS

Chapter One»

SCHVffilTZER'S POSITION

1. sketch of his life.

To say that Albert Schweitzer is the most interesting, or the most

versatile, or the most disturbing figure in the theological world of

recent times would probably be an over-statement. Nevertheless, his

works do combine the qualities of interest, versatility, and paradox

to a surprising degree. They have enjoyed a popularity seldom accord­

ed to such learned studies, some of them having been published in as

many as six different languages. They cover a wide range of subjects,

including music, philosophy, New Testament criticism, medicine, mis­

sions, and autobiography. 1 They show a forceful thinking and an ear­

nest search for truth, even when, as in the case of his work on the

life of Jesus, he feels constrained to contradict the accepted views

of Christendom as a whole. Small wonder, then, that they should have

provoked a host of replies in the form of magazine articles, books, and

even this thesis, whose purpose it shall be, not only to understand and

explain, but also to appraise the truth and permanent value of "Dr. Al­

bert Schweitzer's Eschatological Interpretation of the Life of Jesus."

Only an unusual man could produce such an array of works. That

Dr. Schweitzer is an unusual man the study of his life will show. He

1. A complete list of Schweitzer's works, including translations, is given in the Bibliography at the end of the thesis.

has given an intimate account of it in his autobiography: My Life

and Thought. As the title indicates, he not only relates the many

events of his crowded life, but also sketches out the trains of his

thought, and explains how he arrived at the conclusions expressed in

his books. It would be superfluous to go into all the details here,

since he has so carefully set them forth. Let the following re'sumS

suffice for the purposes of this thesis:

Albert Schweitzer was born on January 14, 1875, the son of Louis

Schweitzer, then pastor of the Evangelical Congregation at Kaysersberg

in Upper Alsace, and of Adele Schillinger Schweitzer, herself a

daughter of the manse. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to

Grtlnsbach, where his father remained as pastor until his death in 1925«

Here the boy grew up in a pious Christian home, attending the village

school, and showing a prodigious musical ability in the piano and organ

lessons which his father gave him. In the year 1884-1885, he attended

the Kealschule at Mlinster, but then, through the generosity of his

god-father, he was able to continue his education at the Gymnasium

at Mlhausen (now Mulhouse), and to study organ with Eugene Mttnch.

After graduation in 1893, he went to Paris for organ lessons from

Charles-Marie Widors and thence to the University of Strassburg.

Here he devoted himself to philosophy and theology. His profes­

sor of New Testament was the great Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, whom he

admired very much, but with whom he soon found himself differing. This

is the story as Schweitzer himself tells it:

"On April 1st, 1894, I began my year of military service, but the kindness of my captain, Krull by name, made it possible for me, during the periods of regular routine, to be at the University by eleven o'clock almost every day, . . .

"When in the autumn we went on manoeuvres in the neighbour-

hood of Hochfelden (Lower Alsace), I put my Greek Testament in my haversack. I may explain that at the beginning of the winter term thfcse theological students who wished to compete for a scholarship had to pass an examination. ... I chose the Synoptic Gospels. .... Being then so*ttat I did not know what fatigue was, I was able to get through some real work in the evenings and on the rest- days. During the summer I had gone through Holtzmann's commentary. Now I wanted to get a knowledge of the text, and see how much I remembered of his commentary and his lectures. This had for me a remarkable result. Holtzmann had gained recognition in scientific circles for the Marcan hypothesis, that is, the theory that Mark's Gospel is the oldest, and that its plan underlies those of Matthew and Luke. That seemed to justify the conclusion that the activi­ ties of jesus can be understood from Mark's Gospel only. By this conclusion I felt, to my astonishment, sorely puzzled when on a certain rest-day which we spent in the village of Guggenheim, I concentrated on the tenth and eleventh chapters of Matthew, and became conscious of the significance of what is narrated in these two chapters by him alone, and not by Mark as well. ....

"Thus was I, at the end of my first year at the University, landed in perplexity about the explanation then accepted as his­ torically correct of the words and actions of Jesus when He sent out the disciples on their mission, and as a consequence of this about the wider question of the conception of the whole life of Jesus which was then regarded as history. When I reached home after the manoeuvres entirely new horizons had opened themselves to me. Of this I was certain: that Jesus had announced no kingdom that was to be founded and realized in the natural world by Himself and the believers, but one that was to be expected as coming with the almost immediate dawn of a supernatural age."-'-

This incident was the beginning of the eschatological interpreta­

tion of the life of Jesus. As he continued his studies he spent more

and more time upon his researches in this direction, he received a

fresh impetus when, at the end of his University course, he presented

himself for the first theological examination, and was given as subject

for the candidates' thesis: "Schleiermacher 1 s teaching about the Last

Supper compared with the conceptions of it embodied in the New Testa­

ment and the confessions of Faith drawn up by the Reformers." As he

read Schleiermacher's Dogmatics on the subject, he was struck by the

remark that in Mark and Matthew there is no command on Jesus' part to

1. My Life and Thought, English edition, pp.16-20, abridged.

repeat the celebration of the meal, uttiy, then, did the disciples

celebrate it? Here was another problem which demanded attention.

He passed the first theological examination on May 6, 1893,

and was awarded the Goll scholarship of 1200 marks (about t 60) per

year for six years, on condition that he should by the end of that

time take the degree of Licentiate in Theology at Strassburg, or re­

pay the money received. If the life of Jesus had been his first in­

terest, philosophy had been a close second. Hi; now determined to take

first his Doctorate in Philosophy, and chose as the subject of his study

"Kant's Philosophy of Religion". Accordingly, he spent the winter of

1898-1899 in Paris, where he carried on his research and also attended

some lectures at the Protestant theological faculty. He continued the

organ lessons with Widor which he had begun in 1893. The following

summer he went to Berlin, where he met Harnack and many other leading

personages of the time. He received his Ph.D. degree from Strassburg

in July, 1899.

He would have liked to go next to England, but decided to finish tWt"

his work for the Licentiate as soon as possible, so^another needy stu­

dent might have the scholarship. He therefore remained at Strassburg,

where he became assistant at St. Nicholas 1 church (after passing his

second examination in July, 1900, he was made a curate), and returned

to the studies of the life of Jesus which had attracted so much of his

attention during his University course. The problem of the Last Supper,

especially, pressed for solution. He planned a three-fold treatise, the

first part to deal with "The Problem of the Last Supper on the basis of

the scientific research of the 19th century and the historical records",

the second to establish the underlying conceptions in the life and

thought of oesus which led Him to celebrate it with his disciples on

the evening before His death, and the third to trace the celebration

of the Lord's Supper in the primitive-ohristian and early ohristian

periods, and to show how the woman mass and the ureek (Orthodox) mys­

tery developed from it naturally and necessarily,-1- The first part

of the work alone was sufficient to earn him the Licentiate degree

on July 21, 1900. The second, which became a "Sketch of the Life of

Jesus 11 , appeared with the first in 1901, and won for its author the

post of Privat-Dozent at the University. The third part was never

published as originally planned, although it was developed in the form

of lecture notes, as was also a similar history of the sacrament of

baptism, and a discussion of the relations of the Johannine doctrines

to the Symoptic and the Pauline, but none of this material found its

way into print until 1930, when it was incorporated into The Mysticism

of Paul the Apostle. 2

The years which followed are typical of the prodigious volume

and variety of Schweitzer's work. Besides his duties as curate at

the church and as lecturer at the University, he found time during

the vacations to visit his home at utlnsbach, or his friend and teacher

widor in Paris. In 1903 he was elected Principal of the theological

college, and held this post in addition to the other two. Besides

all this, he had as early as 1896 come to the conclusion that he owed

uod a debt of service for all the benefits and privileges he had en­

joyed, and now he began experimenting with various social service

projects, without much success. One afternoon, as he was glancing

1. See the preface to pas Abendmahlsproblem. p. xii.

2. See chapters ZI and

through the Paris Missionary Society Journal, he came won an appeal

for a medical doctor for the mission station at Lambarene in French

Gabon (part of Equatorial Africa). This seemed to him a call from

heaven, so in 1905 he embarked upon a course of medical studies. He

resigned his principalship at the theological college, but continued

as preacher and lecturer. Music, too, was making great demands on

his time. He was in great demand as an organist, and used to play

for all the concerts of the Paris Bach Society, and often for those

of the Orfeo Catala" at Barcelona. Yet in spite of all these activi­

ties, the flow of books from his pen went on undiminished. He so

distinguished himself by a book on Bach written in French, at Widor's

suggestion, and published in 1905, that he had to undertake a Uerman

edition, which appeared in 190S. An Essay on German and French Organ-

Building and Organ-Playing, contributed to the periodical Die Musik

in 1906, led to his being called in by the uongress of the inter­

national Music Society at Vienna in 1909 to help draw up a set of

International Regulations for Organ-Building. And just before he

set out for Africa, he and Widor published the first five volumes of

a new American edition of Bach's organ works.*

In the realm of New Testament criticism, he published in 1906

his epoch-making Quest of the Historical Jesus. It had originally

been intended as an appendix to the sketch of the Life of Jesus,

dealing with the history of research into the life of oesus, but had

grown into a volume of 401 pages, whereas the original sketch had

only 109- A revised edition of the Quest which he brought out in

1913 contained 642 pages. His thesis for the medical doctorate, en-

1. see the complete list of ochweitzer's works in the bibliography.

titled uie paychiatrische ceurteilung Jesu, shows that Jesus was not

a paranoiac, but that His belief in His Messiahship and the necessity

of the Passion were natural results of His eschatological beliefs.

irora the "Life of Jesus" literature, achweitzer now turned to the

history of Pauline research (English title, Paul and His Interpreters) t

and then started work on The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, which,

however, he was unable to bring to completion until just as"; he was'*imi

arriving in Africa for the third time in 1930.

Finally, in 1912, after having overcome the opposition of sup­

posedly Christian friends who did not want him to "throw himself

away", and of the Paris Missionary Society, who felt that his unusual

interpretation of the life of Jesus might be dangerous, he resigned

his positions as preacher at St. Nicholas 1 church and as lecturer in

New Testament at the University, and the following spring he set out

with his bride, Helen Bresslau Schweitzer, a trained nurse, for a

new chapter in an already full life.

He found being a jungle doctor fully as strenuous as his previous

life had been. There had been no regular doctor at Lambarene" for so

long that there was more disease than he could cope with, and no de­

cent hospital equipment. Yet in spite of all this new work, he found

time to keep up his organ-practising on a special piano with pedal

attachment given him by the Paris Bach Society. A temporary respite

came at the outbreak of the first World War, when, as German citizens,

he and his wife were made prisoners of war by the French authorities,

and not allowed to do medical work. Instead, however, of going on

with his work on Pauline mysticism, he turned to the Philosophy of

Civilisation, a subject which had been in his mind for years, and

which the war had brought to his attention anew. But his respite

from medical work did not last long, oases of imperative need had

to be dealt with, and he was the only doctor for miles around. So

they were soon hard at work again, until 1917, when, still prisoners,

they were taken to concentration camps in France, and the following

year exchanged and sent home to Strassburg in broken health and with­

out any means of support.

Through friends he was able to obtain positions as doctor in a

Strassburg hospital and curate at St. Nicholas 1 church, where he had

preached so long before leaving for Africa. Lack of health and funds

made it seem unlikely that he would ever be able to return to his

missionary work. He retained his two posts after the war, and until

1921. When Alsace became French, he and his wife acquired French

citizenship. But he was too great a man to be hid from the world

for long. In 1919 he went to Barcelona to play for the Orfeo Cat aid.

In 1920, he was invited to give the Olaus-Petri lectures at the

University of Uppsala in Sweden. While there, his health improved

so much that he went on a lecture tour to raise money to pay the

debts he had contracted for his mission work during the war. He was

also persuaded to publish his missionary memoirs, under the title

On the Edge of the Primeval Forest. The way had opened again for him:

he could raise enough money by his lecture and concert tours and by

his books to return to Africa and keep his work going there. During

the next few years (1921-1923) he made several such tours, to Sweden,

Denmark, England, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia. He was able to

bring out the first two (out of a projected four) volumes on the

Philosophy of Civilisation, which he had started in Africa, and to

publish his lectures on Christianity and the Religions of the World,

delivered at Selly Oak College, Birmingham, and his Memoirs of Child­

hood and Youth.

In 1924, he was able to go back to Africa, without his wife and

daughter. His old hospital was so ruined by neglect that it had to

be completely rebuilt. Soon the number of his patients had increased

so greatly that more doctors and a new hospital were needed. There

was no time for writing during this period, except for letters and a

few sketches of his work for its friends and supporters. These were

collected, however, and published under the title Mitteilungen aus

Lambarene1 . The work of building up both staff and plant took until

1927, when Schweitzer was finally able to return to Europe, leaving

a working organization to Carry on in his absence.

The years 192& and 1929 were spent in lecture and concert tours

throughout Northern Europe. In 1923, he received from the city of

Frankfurt the newly created Goethe prize for service to humanity. His

writing at this time was confined to The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle,

the final chapters of which were finished on the boat back to Lam-

bare'ne'. Mine. Schweitzer was well enough to accompany him on this

voyage, but soon found the African climate too much for her, and had

to return, ur. Schweitzer wrote his autobiography in Lambare'ne in

1931, and it was published the same year.2 Later, he, too, returned

to Europe. Among others he delivered the Hibbert Lectures for 1934

at Oxford and London, and the Gifford Lectures for 1934 and 1935 at

1. English title, More From the Primeval Forest; American edition, The Forest Hospital at Lambar&ie'.

2. *fy Life and Thought. This book is the source of most of the fore­ going sketch of Schweitzer's life.

Edinburgh. In the latter year he published, his treatise on Indian

Thought and Its Development,

He went back to Africa a fourth time in 1937- Another book of

African notes, From My African Notebook, appeared in 1939. In that

same year, he had planned another visit to Europe. It was cut off,

however, by the gathering clouds of war, and he returned to Africa

almost immediately, taking time only to make arrangements for his

family's safety. Mine. Schweitzer escaped from Alsace when the Ger­

mans invaded in 1940, and eventually managed to join her husband in

Africa, Their daughter was married in Alsace in 1943. The Schweitzers

remained in Lambare'ne' throughout the war, unmolested this time because

they were now French citizens. Dr. Schweitzer has been working on

the third, and final, volume of his Philosophy of Civilisation, to

be entitled Reverence for Life. He hopes to publish it this summer

(1948) when he returns to Europe*

2. Resume" of Schweitzer's position,

a. Das Abendmahlsproblem.

The first of Schweitzer's theological works to be published was

his two-fold treatise on the Last Supper. 1 His thoughts had first

been centered ur)on the subject by his candidate's thesis for the first

theological examination. 2 He went into it more fully for his L.Th.

thesis, in which he came to the following conclusions:

The theblpgians of his day, and of the nineteenth century in

1. Das Abendmahl. of which the first part was Das Abendmahlsproblem, and the second Has Messianitats- und Leidensgeheimnis: Eine Skizze des Lebens Jesu.

2. See above, pp. 3-4.

if

11

general, had felt that there was a problem connected with the Last

Supper, but had not got very far twward solving it, because they had

been preoccupied with detailed questions. Schweitzer analyzes the

situation, and finds that all the research varies in its results

according as it gives more importance to the fact that Jesus took

bread and wine and blessed them and gave them to the disciples, or

to the fact that the disciples partook of the elements.

Following (Jalvin, the first group of interpreters1 made the

words, "This is my body, this is my blood" more important, inter­

preting them to mean that by partaking of the elements the communi­

cants shared in the benefits of Christ's death. But they are so

uncertain about the relation of the different problems which arise

that they cannot be summed up any further*

The next group^ lays the emphasis on the communion itself, as

a remembrance of Jesus' last supper on earth. They leave the death

of Jesus entirely out of consideration, since they do not think He

knew exactly when or how it would come. Spitta made the greatest

contribution by the suggestion that this was an anticipatory cele­

bration of the Messianic meal.

Closely allied to these, but with secondary emphasis also on

Jesus' words, "This is my body; this is my blood", are Harnack, Haupt,

Schultzen, and Hoffman. They make the physical eating of the bread

and wine a symbol of the spiritual nourishment of Christ. But the

symbol is only valid when Christ Himself blessed the elements and

1. De Wette, Ebrard, Rtlckert, An the first half of the nineteenth century; Keim, Weizsacker, Beyschlag, Holtzmann, Lobstein,WSchmiedel in the second half.

2. Strauss, Bauer, and Renan about 1350; Brandt, Spitta, and Eichhorn about 1390.

distributed them. There would be no point in repeating the ceremony

unless Christ had specifically commanded it.

This command to repeat turns out to be an important factor in

the discussion. The more emphasis is laid on the fact that Jesus dis­

tributed the elements as His body and His blood, the more necessary

it becomes that He should have commanded the disciples to repeat it,

for otherwise the ceremony would have no meaning in the early church.

On the other hand, the more emphasis is laid on the conception of the

Last Supper as a communal meal, the more likely it is that the dis­

ciples might have repeated it as a symbol of ohristian brotherhood,

without any specific command on Jesus' part. Thus the relation of

Jesus' original supper to the celebration of it by the early church

depends on the emphasis. If the original meal was merely a communal

one,, then the Agape was identical with it, but then the words of Jesus

have no significance whatever. On the other hand, the more emphasis

is laid on Jesus' words, the less it is possible to explain how the

early Christian celebration grew out of it.

The next attempts at solving the problem were those of P. W,

Schmi«del and Jtilicher. Schmiedel, by closely following the text,

finds the words of Jesus most important, but cannot explain why the

early Christians celebrated it at all. JUlicher pretends to do so,

but the celebration he describes is not really that of the early

church, which Cannot be explained on his grounds.

Therefore, says Schweitzer, those who emphasize the fact that

the disciples shared the elements can explain the sacrament of the

early church, but not the meaning of the original Last Supper, while

those Who stress the symbolism of the broken bread and the outpoured

13

wine can explain the original significance, but not why the early

church repeated the ceremony. Attempts to combine the two lose the

one in proportion as they gain the other. So none of these concep­

tions can solve the riddle. An entirely hew start must be made.

Schweitzer gets his new start by supposing that the order of

events as related in the records is unimportant, and that Jesus spoke

the "parable" of the body and the blood while the disciples were par­

taking of the elements, or even afterwards, but that it was recorded

beforehand because the two events co^ld not be written down simul­

taneously. Thus he supposes that the "parable" is to be explained

from the Supper, rather than the Supper from the "parable."

He then turns to the five historical records of the Last Supper:

Luke 22.14*20 (which he considers most original in its longer, double,

form), Mark 14.22-26, Matthew 26.26-29, I Corinthians 11.23-26, and

Justin I Apol. 66. After studying these from the point of view of

the textual critic, he decides that they come from different tradi­

tions, and that each should be studied separately.

He takes Mark first, and points out that the bread is massed

and eaten before Jesus says: "Take, eat: this is my body," and that

the wine is passed and drunk before Jesus speaks of the "blood of the

new testament which is shed for many", and that Jesus goes on immedi­

ately to express His expectation to drink it new with them in His

Father's Kingdom. If this be the authentic account, then it should

be the starting-point of the study. Schweitzer then goes on to show

how each of the other records alters the story to make both parts,

the passing of the bread and the passing of the wine, more similar.

Matthew shows the assimilation started but not completed. Luke's

account shows extensive working over, apparently in the interests of

making the part about the bread like the part about the wine. Justin,

on the other hand, shortens the latter to agree with the former.

But that record is surely authentic, Schweitzer argues, which

shows no influence of the communion service of later times. So the

Marcan record must be the authentic one. For all the others were

affected by the similar use of bread and wine in the Lord"® Supper

of the early church. Matthew's is not entirely assimilated, but the

influence can be seen. Paul and Justin are seeking to explain, not

the original act of Jesus, but the communion of the early church.

Luke's is a literary product,

We have now a new approach to the problem in Mark's record.

Jesus had the disciples eat and drink before He explained the sym­

bolism. Therefore, reasons Schweitzer, the eating and drinking must

have been the important thing, and not the explanation. He then finds

his explanation in the thought of the coming celebration in the

Father's Kingdom. In other words, the original Last Supper was in­

tended as a proleptic celebration of the Messianic banquet. The dis­

ciples understood and commemorated it as such. Hiven Paul sees this

connection: "Ye do show forth the Lord's death till He come." (I Cor.

11.26). Jesus is therefore speaking not only of his death, but also

of the Messianic Kingdom soon to follow, when He has risen to glory.

Thus eschatology enters into the understanding of the celebration,

and helps to solve the problems.

b. The Mystery of the Kingdom of

But before he can consider the problem properly solved, ochweitaer

1. This is the English title of the sketch of the Life of Jesus, the second part of the two-fold Das Abendmahl treatise.

15

decides he must show the basis for it in the life and thoughts of

Jesus Himself, So in this second volume of uas Abendmahl. he traces

the eschatological background of the life of Jesus, as "historical!^1

conceived. Just what he means by a "historical" life is explained

in the first two paragraphs:

"The Synoptical texts do not explain how the idea of the Passion forced itself upon Jesus, and what it meant to Him. The speeches of Peter and Paul viewed the Passion in the aspect of a divine necessity which was prophesied by the scripture. The Pauline theory likewise has nothing to do with history.

"Therefore the idea of the Passion as it is developed here in connection with an account of Jesus' life is not directly furnished by the texts, but it deduced from them by application. One is left here to the unavoidable necessity of formulating a theory, the truth of which can only be judged by the measure of clearness and order which it introduces into the synoptic accounts."^

But Schweitzer cannot concur in the theoretical reconstruction

of history which was current in his time. He disagrees with four of

its fundamental assumptions:

"1. The life of Jesus falls into two contrasted epochs. The first was fortunate, the second brought disillusion and ill success."2

But He encountered many difficulties, including the plots of the

Pharisees (Mk.3.6), the doubts of His family and friends as to His

sanity (Mk.3.21), and the hostility of the people of nazareth (Mk.6.5),

during the first period, while the enthusiasm of the crowd at the

Triumphal Entry (Mk.11.^-10) shows He had not failed in the second.

"2. The form of the synoptical Passion-idea in Mark 10,45 (His giving Himself a ransom for many) and in the institution of the Lord's Supper ("A. 14.24: His blood for many) is somehow or other influenced by the Pauline theory of the atonement."3

1. The Mystery of the Kingdom of uod, hereinafter referred to as the sketch, English edition, p. 59.

2. sketch, p. 63, refuted on pp.64-69*

3. ibid., p. 63, refuted on pp.70-73.

16

but Paul's (and Luke's) "My body for jou" (I Cor.11.24; Lk.22.19-20J

referring to a definite group of Christians, is a later idea than

Mark's and Matthew's "for many" (Mk.14.24? Mt.26,2^), which Jesus un­

doubtedly used, lest the apostles think His self-sacrifice was for

them alone.

"3. The conception of the Kingdom of uod as a self-fulfilling ethical society, in which service is the highest law, dominated the Passion."1

But Jesus' remark to James and John, who had asked for the chief seats

in the Kingdom, that "whosoever would become great among you shall be

your minister, and whosoever would be first among you shall be servant

of all" (Mk.10.43-44 ), quite definitely enioins present service in

order to future greatness. "For the son of man came not to be minis­

tered unto, but to minister, and to give tiis life a ransom for many"

(Mk.10.45), not as an example, but to fit Himself to be ruler of all

when the Kingdom comes. Moreover, schweitzer asserts, there was a

close connection in Jesus' mind between the Passion and the future

idngdom. In the first period, when He expected a general tribulation,

He urged His disciples to be loyal to the end, "for whosoever shall be

ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation,

of him shall the son of man be ashamed when ne cornetu in the glory of

His Father with the holy angels" (Mk,8.38). Later on, each time the

disciples strive about their relative positions in the Kingdom (Mk.

9*34, Mk.10.37), this follows immediately a prediction of the Passion

(Mk.9.31, Mk.10.33-34), so that Jesus must have indicated some con­

nection. At the Last Supper, the idea of His shedding His blood for

many (Mk.14.24) leads naturally to the thought of the Kingdom, where

1. Sketch, p. 63, refuted on pp.73-80.

17

He will next taste wine (Mk.14.25). And even before the High Priest,

the confession which condemned Him brought with it the idea of His

future glory (Mk.14.62).

"4. If Jesus' passion was the inaugural act of the new morality of the Kingdom of God, the success of it depended uDon the disciples being led to understand it in this sense, and to act in accordance with it. The Passion-idea was a reflection."1

But this is just what it was not. It remained a mystery to the apos­

tles to the end.

If these four fundamental assumptions are untenable, it follows

that a new study of the life of Jesus is necessary which will cover

all the facts and explain the many problems. This is the Eschatologico-

Historical Interpretation.

A great deal of the difficulty has come, Schweitzer thinks, from

attempts to explain away the eschatological elements in the life of

Jesus. To assume that He was merely an ethical teacher does violence

to the text. To see in His words a spiritualisation of the eschatology

is not warranted, since the Synoptic gospels show no trace of it. The

"development" theory of a successful period of ethical teaching, fol­

lowed by an unsuccessful period which drove Him to eschatology, has

already been proven false. The only remaining course seems to be to

accept the eschatological at its face value.

But if eschatology takes first place, what becomes of the ethical

teaching? It becomes a call to repentance in the full sense of the

Greek word |46flv6ift - a moral renewal before the Day of Judgment which

comes with the Kingdom. Only the morally fit will enter the Kingdom

(lit.?.21 and the Beatitudes, Mt.5.3-10), But again, the ethics are

present, the Kingdom is future. This is what Schweitzer means by an

1. Sketch, p. 64, refuted on pp.^0-31,

"interim-ethic" - it is a preparation for the Kingdom, not a part of

it, for the Kingdom needs no ethics.

And ethics are important for another reason, implied but not

stated by Jesus - that the Kingdom can only come when moral conditions

on earth are right. This is the significance of the emphasis on a

moral community. Just why this is true Jesus does not explain, except

as a mystery, in parables.

The first group of parables of the Kingdom (Mk.4.3-9,26-32; cf.

Mt.13.3-9,24-33) all have one message, according to Schweitzer, who

rejects the allegorical interpretation of the parable of the sower

(Mk.4.13-20; Mt.13.IB-23) as a later addition. Much that the sower

sowed was lost, yet his harvest was thirty-, sixty-, even a hundredfold.

Another sower sowed, then paid no more attention to it, yet there was

a great harvest. The mustard seed, though small, became a great tree.

The little piece of leaven made the whole loaf leavened. These miracles

of nature point to an even greater miracle, that of the Kingdom.

Further light is thrown by the hitherto unintelligible word of Jesus

in Mb.11.12: "From the days of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom

of Heaven suffereth violence, and men of violence take it by force."

Apparently Jesus is referring to the idea that man's repentance is

exerting pressure on God to bring in the Kingdom.

This relationship between ethics and eschatology first occurs in

the Old Testament prophets, who promised a Day of Judgment because of

the nation's wickedness, and a day of victory if it would repent and

return. After the exile, devotion to the Law was considered the con­

dition of the Kingdom, which now took on apocalyptic aspects. Jesus'

l|ystery of the Kingdom of God is therefore a synthesis of prophetic

and apocalyptic elements.

19

The Mystery of the Kingdom of God is Schweitzer's explanation of

many problems of exegesis. It makes unnecessary the assumption of a

successful period of Jesus' preaching, for only slight success would

be necessary to bring in the Kingdom. It explains how, although Je­

sus preached to a few Galileans, the Kingdom could be expected to

cover the whole world. Likewise, Jesus could hold the Law inviolable,

for His morality went beyond the Law, and brought in the Kingdom where

Law would no longer be necessary. He had no hesitation about "render­

ing unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" (Mk.12.17), since Cae­

sar's power would soon be abrogated. Thus even in its character as

"interim-ethic", Christian ethics is still an important part of Jesus'

teaching.

In the Jerusalem period, Jesus gave more parables of the Kingdom:

the vineyard (Ht.21.33-49), the marriage (Mt.22.1-14), the watching

servant (Mb.24.42-47), the ten virgins (Mt.25.1-13), and the talents

(J:t.25»14-30). But they contain no mystery. They merely point to the

immediacy of the Kingdom, and the need for moral conduct before the

Judgment. Something has happened since the first group of parables,

so that the Mystery of the Kingdom of God is no longer important,

What has happened is recorded in Matthew chapters 10 and 11,

which first arrested Schweitzer's attention.-1- In chapter 10, Jesus

sends out the twelve to preach the gospel, .first He tells them to

go not to the Gentiles or the Samaritans, but "to the lost sheep of

the house of Israel" (ilt.10.6). The sum total of their message is to

be: "The Kingdom of God is at hand. "(Mt.10.7). They are to do the

miracles He has been doing 0*t,10.3), and to depend entirely on their

1. See above, pp.2-3.

20

preaching for their living (lfb.10.9-10). He promises doom upon those

who will not receive the gospel they preach (Mt.10.11-15), but they

themselves will have to endure persecutions ( It.10.16-23), and "Verily

I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone through the cities of Israel,

till the Son of Van be come" (Mt.10.23). Then follow exhortations to

loyalty in the face of persecution, and promises of reward to those

who are faithful wven unto death O't.10.24-42). Apparently Jesus does

not expect the apostles to return, for He expects that while they are

still on their mission, the great pre-Messianic tribulation will break

out, and be followed by the appearance of the Son of Man upon the

clouds of Heaven, as recorded in Daniel (7.13), and the davvn of Mes­

siah's reign. That the disciples do eventually return (Mk.6.30), and

apparently without having suffered persecution, puzzles Jesus. Instead

of rejoicing with them, or congratulating them on their good work, He

immediately tries to retire with them to a desert place apart (Mk.6.31;

cf. Mt.l4.13)« That He is foiled by the crowds who follow Him around

the edge of the lake only strengthens His determination to withdraw.

He must get away to thihk through these unexpected developments, and

plan what to do next. Why has the Kingdom not come as He expected?

The "Suffering Servant" passages in Isaiah now convince Him that

He is to suffer the pre-Messianic persecution alone, in place of His

followers, who will thereby escape it. Accordingly, He sets His face

to go to Jerusalem, there by His self-sacrifice to fulfill the last

condition so that the Kingdom may come. He finally succeeds in pro­

voking the authorities to crucify Him, and His body is laid to rest

in Joseph's tomb. When, on the third day, the tomb is found empty,

His disciples conclude that He has gone to Heavenly glory to await

21

the time when He shall appear as the son of Man. This Mystery of the

Passion now takes the place of the Mystery of the Kingdom of God which

He had previously preached.

The eleventh chapter of Matthew raises another problem. John

the Baptist, lying in Herod's prison, hears of Jesus' preaching and

miracles, and sends his disciples to ask, "Art thou He that should

come, or look we for another?" (Mt.11.3). That Jesus does not give

a simple answer to this simple question has always been a subject of

perplexity to exegetes. Instead, Me says, "Go and tell John the things

that ye hear and see" (Mb.11.4), and points to the very preaching and

miracles that had provoked John's question in the first place. Why

this evasive answer? According to Schweitzer, "He that should come"

(8 cp)(oJACvos) refers, not to the Messiah, who was not expected to ap­

pear until He came on the clouds of Heaven, but to His great forerunner,

Elijah, who was to come and prepare the way for the Kingdom. Similarly,

John's disclaimer at Jordan (Mk.1.7-3, f<!t.3.11-12) did not refer to the

Messiah, but to Elijah who should precede Him. Now, in company with

Jesus' own disciples,and the crowds, he thinks of Jesus as the Fore­

runner of the Kingdom, and asks for confirmation. Jesus, however,

knows that He is the Messiah. That fact had been disclosed to Him at

His baptism, if indeed He did not suspect it befoce that, but He does

not feel free to disclose His identity. So now, in answer to Bonn's

question, Me makes His enigmatic reply. Immediately after John's dis­

ciples have departed, He speaks mysteriously of oohn as Elijah (1ft.11.14).

He Calls him the greatest born of woman, yet goes on to say that the

least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he (Mt.ll.ll), presumably

because those who are in the Kingdom have been lifted to a supernatural

level, beyond the greatest human being ever born.

22

So far Jesus alone knows that He is the Ifessiah, and even He

does not think of Himself as at present Messiah, but only as Messiah-

to-be. He has kept His identity a strict secret, for Messiah's iden­

tity is notr known until His final appearance as Aing and Judge. And

those who do not know His secret have no reason for suspecting it.

However, once they do know, it is nossible to see how it colours

some of His utterances. For instance, when, in healing the para­

lytic, He forgives his sins,(Mk.2.1-12), and the scribes challenge

His authority to do so, He replies that the Son of Man - whom they

do not recognize Him to be - has power on earth to forgive sins (ilk.

2.10). Likewise, when He sends out the twelve, He enjoins them to

be loyal to Him personallv ( t.!0.32). Only after the return of the

twelve do any of them learn His secret. On the mount of Transfigu­

ration (Mk.9-2-13), Peter and James and John, who have gone up to

pray with Jesus, are granted a vision of His future glory. Jesus

charges them to keep the secret (lik.9-9). The disciples are be­

wildered - where is Elijah, if jesus be not he? (Mk.9.11). So Jesus

explains to them, as He had to the crowd in their absence (Mb. 11.11)

that John is Elijah, some time later (for Schweitzer finds it neces-

sarv to alter the order of events from that of Mark's gospel in order

to remove the doublet of the mraculous feeding (Mk.6.35-44 and Mk.8.

1-9) and account for the unexplained appearance and disappearance of

the crowd on the latter occasion), Peter, in answer to Jesus' question,

blurts out the Messianic secret (Mk.3.27-30). Mow the whole circle

of the apostles kraws the truth, but Jesus again enjoins secrecy.

Un the occasion of the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, it is not

the Messiah whom the crowd acclaims, but again "He that cometh in the

23

na-ie of the Lord"(Mk.11.9), that is,o epY^feVos , Elijah. The '-nests

and Sadducee^ seek a ground to arrest Him, but can find none, also thrjy

fear the crowd. Then dudas, one of the twelve who know the secret, re­

veals it to the priests, ihis is the betrayal. Jesus is arrested, and

when no other charge against Him prevails, the High Priest asks if He

is the Messiah. Jesus proudly replies that He is, and that they shall

"see the Son of Man sitting gt the right hand of power, and coming with

the clouds of Heaven" O-flc.14.62). So He is convicted of blasphemy.

Next morning, when the crowd learns the charge, it too turns against

Him, and shouts, "Crucify Him!" (Mk.15.13-14). Thus it becomes clear

why jesus had kept His identity a secret - it was not necessary for the

people to know it, and only caused offence when they did.

This yystery of the Messiahship, together vdth those of the Kingdom

of God and of the Passion, make up the subject matter of Schweitzer's

life of jesus, a sketch of which is given in the final chapter of the

book. The life is divided into two periods, the earlier one of preach­

ing in Galilee, and the later appearance in Jerusalem, separated by a

longer period of retirement in the country to the north. During the

first period, Jesus is working for the Kingdom by His ethical preaching,

enforced by miracles. But there is an eschatological motive in the first

period as well as in the last, for Jesus knows that He is to be Messiah,

and is looking for the supernatural Kingdom. When the coming of the har­

vest-time convinces Him that the Kingdom is about to appear, He sends out

His disciples to cap the climax of the preaching campaign. He warns them

of the pre-Messianic tribulation, and does not expect them back. During

their absence He prepares the people for His re-appearance in glory as

the Son of Man by intimating that John is Elijah. But the disciples do

return, and the Kingdom has not yet come. The crowd, augmented by the

24

apostles' preaching, follows Him around the lake. There He celebrates

with them an anticipatory celebration of the Messianic meal, which He

still expects immediately, although the participants are as unaware of

its character as they are of His identity with the Son of I/an. Then

He retires to pray, while the disciples set sail across the lake. Dur­

ing the storm they are blown close to the shore in the darkness, and

see Jesus, who has come to join them, apparently walking upon the wa­

ter. As He enters the boat, the storm abates.

Six days later He takes the three "intimates", Peter, James, and

John, up the mountain to pray with Him. There they learn His identity

through the Transfiguration, which is apparently an ecstatic vision

shared by all. The continued delay of the Kingdom causes Jesus to

seek a reason. He comes to the conclusion that He must fulfill in His

own person the prophecies about the Suffering Servant of the Lord, and

bear the pre-Messianic tribulation alone. He withdraws with His dis­

ciples to the north, and there, after they learn His identity through

Peter's confession, He reveals the secret of the Passion to them. He

chooses the following Passover as the time of His self-sacrifice because

there will be more prospective members of the Kingdom at Jerusalem then.

He is recognized at Jericho by the miracle of healing blind Bartimaeus,

and acclaimed at the iriumphal Entry as the great Prophet and Forerunner*

He deliberately provokes the authorities by His attitude so that they

will seize and kill Him. Their fear of the people is only overcome by

Judas' betrayal of the Messianic secret. The evening before His death

Jesus again celebrates the Messianic losal with the apostles in antici­

pation of His return after His death. Then He retires to pray with

Peter, who has just sworn to be loyal even unto death, and James and

John, who have said they are able to drink His cup with Him, that they

may all escape the tribulation. The apostles, who do not understand

the danger, fall asleep, but Jesus accedes to the Heavenly will that

He must die. He is arrested, condemned for blasphemy, and crucified,

the following day.

In his epilogue to this work, Schweitzer asserts that He has re­

stored to -Tesus the honour due to His greatness, which the "liberal"

school of critics, with their theologising and psychologising, had

destroyed, but which must needs be the basis of any true worship.

c. The niest of the Historical Jesus.

The Quest of the Historical Jesus is undoubtedly Schweitzer's

best known work in the New Testament field. His two-fold Abendmahl

had not received wide attention. But the Quest, a history of re­

search into the life of Jesus, commanded it. Yet it really adds very

little to the understanding of Schweitzer 1 s own views which can be

gained from the Sketch. Its chief contribution is that it gives his

estimate of his predecessors' research. It is a very thorough account,

comprising 401 pages in the first German (and English) edition, and

enlarged to 642 pages in the second (untranslated) edition, which

deals also with Schweitzer's contemporaries up to 1912*

He begins by stating the "problem" of the historical Jesus, about

whom the gospels give but meagre and conflicting accounts. The early

church had been forced by the delay of the Messianic appearance to

give more and more heed to His divinity, and recorded only those of

His human deeds and teachings which pointed to His i>fessiahship. As

their eschatological hopes waned, they sought more and more a super­

natural Jesus, such as the Fourth Gospel portrays in its Logos

Christology. The controversies of the early church dealt with

matters of faith, not of history, and the uhalcedonian declaration

for two distinct natures firmly established the supernatural in the

creed of the church. There was no possibility of a really historical

conception of Jesus until this supernatural element could be removed.

Keimartis Was the first to do this. He was not a theologian,

but a professor of Oriental Languages at Hamburg. His The Aims of

Jesus and His Bisciples appeared only after his death, published by

his friend Lessing. He tried to get back of the doctrines to the

facts of Jesus' life. Incidentally, his historical research led him

to consider eschatology the motivating factor in Jesus' life, and to

suppose that the disciples, in order to evade the issue of His fail­

ure to return immediately, dbole His body and allowed it to decompose

before they began preaching the resurrection and the future Parousia.

Reinarus' contemporary semler made a detailed reply to the offence

Caused by such radical views, but they left the world of theology

practica.ily undisturbed for some time.

Nevertheless, the seed of a rational understanding of Jesus'

life had been planted. The following generation began to try to

show how reasonable Jesus' teachings and ethics are. As a result

they tended to read the views of their times into the sayings of Jesus,

which they paraphrased in an attempt to explain them. They usually

evaded the question of the miracles, attaching to them only an ethi-*

cal value. In this grou- Schweitzer names Hess, Reinhard, Opitz,

Jakobi, and above all Herder, who endeavored to explain the differ­

ences between the gospels along literary lines.

Befope long, however, the problem of the miracles had to be

settled. The first to attempt to explain them away were bahrdt and

27

Venturini, who pictured Jesus as the tool of a secret society of Es-

senes, and the miracles as trickery performed by the group. They are

interesting and ingenious attempts, but their imaginings hardly de­

serve the name of research.

Paulus, on the other hand, was a whole-hearted rationalist, who

attacked at every step all that could not be explained by the reason.

His treatment of the miracles, while avoiding the fantastic, neverthe­

less discredits them completely. He supposes that in each case some

secondary cause, of which the disciples were not aware, was involved.

Hase and Schleiermacher follow him in this, although they do not al­

ways venture a solution of the miracles. But they are interested in

another problem - the main connection between the events of Jesus'

life. Schleiermacher, with his emphasis on the fourth Gospel, and

his dialectic treatment, really wrote a life of Jesus based on his

own theology. Hase, on the other hand, made some important contri-

bttions. He regards the stories of the birth and childhood and of

the natural signs that accompanied the crucifixion as "mythical".

He sees Jesus' life divided into two periods, and supposed a devel-

opiawit of His thought. He recognizes the fact that Jesus did not

speak of His Messiahship until after the incident at Uaesarea Phil-

The greatest figure in the whole history of the life of Jesus

research, in Schweitzer's opinion, is David Friederich Strauss.

Faced with the records of supernatural events for which no rational

explanation is satisfactory, he goes behind the records and supposes

that the evangelists, impressed as they were by the Divine in Jesus,

allowed all sorts of myths to creep into their records, the main

28

object of which was to witness to this Divine element in Jesus. Just

how much of the narrative is mythical, Strauss is not always prepared

to say, but his usual judgment is rather too sweeping. Another con­

tribution of Strauss is the exposure of the fact that the Johannine

gospel is based upon a definite -hilosophical theory, which conditions

the narrative, and inserts an apologetic element. But Strauss also

denies the priority of Mark, partly because the rationalists had used

it so effectively, and partly because the events seem so disconnected,

and thinks Matthew forms a better basis for historical research. He

sees in the discourses in Matthew collections of the Mayings of Jesus,

but feels 'fatthew has made the most logical collections, .fcven the

parables have, according to Strauss, been worked over, and are mutually

dependent. On the whole, however, his findings are mostly negative,

and his importance lies in his having swept away so much rubble in

the research. His attitude toward the question of eschatology is al­

most that of Johannes Weiss, in that he thinks of the Kingdom as super­

natural. He acknowledges his debt to tteimarus in this respect.

Three problems arose out of the controversy occasioned by the

appearance of Strauss' life.of Jesus. The first was the question of

miracle, the historicity of which the mythical theory seemed to deny,

whereas the theologians had come around to the view that miracles

were possible, nay probable, and to be explained by greater insight

into natural law than the science of the day could clai^i. &ven the

rationalists, with all their explaining, had supposed sone basis of

fact behind the gospel narrative. The second problem raised by

Strauss' work was philosophical: what is the relation of the Jesus

of history to the uhrist of faith? Schweitzer passes over the r>rob-

29

lem here, pointing out only that Strauss defended his vie,;3 on Hegelian

bases. He raises it again, however, in the concluding chapter of the

uest, in a somewhat different form. The third problem which Strauss

underlined was the relation of John's gospel to the Synoptics as his­

torical sources. It Was largely ignored by supporters of the rourth

gospel, since they based their theology upon it.

The next development was the llarcan hypothesis. It was first

promulgated by vfeisse, on philosophical as well as literary grounds,

and his conclusions were seconded by '.Vilke from the historical noint

of view. Weisse points out especially the apologetic and philosophical

character of the Johannine gospel. But he does not go to the extreme

of basing his whole argument on Mark, just because it i£ first - he

sees mythical elements even In it, especially with regard to the

miracles. He does not find two periods in Jesus' life, but attests

His popularity up to the end, and His forcing the authorities to cru­

cify Him, probably under the influence of the Suffering Servant pas­

sages in Isaiah. He even notices that Jesus did not proclaim his Mes-

siahship to the crowds, but supposes that "the Son of Man" meant

simply "man".

Like Strauss and Weisse, Bruno Bauer shows that the philosophical

background of John nullifies its historicity. To him, the Fourth

gospel stands in direct opposition to the Synoptics. Yet even the

latter may have a purely literary origin, for they set forth the es-

chatological point of view, of which there is no evidence in other

contemporary works. Jesus' silence about His Messiahship shows that

He did not hold Himself to be Messiah. So all the gospels -rust be

literary in their origin. That the disciples took Him for the Lies-

siah is due to the character of tiis work. Their attitude is res­

ponsible for the legends which grew up about Him. Thus Bauer's at­

titude is complete and unreserved scepticism, aroused by the re:ug-

nance of the arguments levelled at atrauss.

Meanwhile, the fantastic lives of Jesus, started by Bahrdt and

Venturini, continued to use the Essenes to explain the miracles.

Their main contribution is that they provide a continuity in the life

of Jesus which the less imaginative lacked. In Ghillany's work smrae-

thing like Schweitzer's eschatological view comes to the fore, al­

though his ueistic church is quite unchristian. But the most impor­

tant of these fanciful lives was written, not by a German, but by a

nrenchman, Renan. His work pretends to be critical, but is really

popular, and covered over by so much sentimental gloss that it is

hard to discover the historical truth.

The German reaction to Renan is the "liberal" life of Jesus.

Strauss himself wrote one, in which the removal of myth leaves a

preconceived spiritual Christ, much like the Johaanine ohrist whom

he denies. For him the eschatology is part of the mythical element.

Schenkel and vveizsacker, though holding to the Marcan hypothesis,

also claim a measure of truth for John's gospel, and use parts of it

in their lives. Holtzmann champions the Marcan hypothesis, which

leads him to discover a development in Jesus' thought - he also finds

traces of it in John - with a break at the controversy over ceremonial

purity in Mark 7, before which Jesus had found success in His attempt

to establish a. spiritual Kingdom, but after which He was doomed to

failure and death. Eschatology is rejected, and the great discourses

in Matthew are all regarded as composite structures. Keiin, who in-

vented the development theory, does not reject the eschatology to

the same degree, although he practically cancels it by his spiritual

interpretation of it. Beyschlag allows johannine influences to

cloud the eschatology, and discovers three periods of development,

ti. Heiss frequently appeals to the argument urn e silent io t and psy­

chologizes too much. In short, all these lives of Jesus mediate

between John and the aymoptics. They do not deal adequately with

the significance of the eschatology or with Jesus' attitude about

His Messiahship. They claim that desus did not reveal it until

late in His ministry in order in the meantime to bring His dis­

ciples to a higher conception of what the Messiahship meant, al­

though there is no indication of that in the text.

But this "liberal" psychologizing view could not be maintained

forever, oolani, as early as 1364, had recognized the eschatology

in the text, although he did not think Jesus considered nimself

the Messiah, but rather as a spiritual son of Man, with the result

that to him the eschatology is interpolated. Volkmar considered

all the gospels late, but Mark the earliest and only historical

source, with Luke before watt hew, so that the eschatology is easy

to eliminate. He rejects the eschatology because his conception

of the Messiahship is wholly political, and Jesus' aims were not

political, so the eschatological passages are a pious fiction of

>Aark. Weiffenbach regards the eschatology as a misunderstanding

of some remark of Jesus about a visible personal return, distorted

by the Jewish hopes of His followers. He makes the resurrection

and the parousia identical, and only supernatural in the mnds of

His disciples because of their own eschatological hones. Balden-

32

sperger brings the light of Jewish apocalyptic to bear on the subject,

and claxins it does not fit Jesus, who spiritualized it. But J. Vfeiss

was the first to give the eschatology its full importance, without

compromise, because he first understands the Kingdom of God non-

spifeitually, as an eschatological conception, with Jesus looking

forward to it, rather than trying to establish it. Jesus preaches

its nearness, but when it does not come, He decides that the people's

repentance is not sufficient, and His own death must be the ~>rice.

In this sense, He dies for His nation. His ethics are world-denying;

His Messiahship is future.

In reply to Weiss, Bousset seeks to contrast Jewish eschatology

with that of Jesus, who, he claims, spiritualized it, along purer

lines. The Kingdom had a present as well as a future aspect, and

Jesus did not deny the world, but had joy in it. His ethical teach­

ing, while of a world-renouncing kind, did nevertheless deal with

the world, and not with some future heavenly Kingdom. All this

shows how modern ideas were attributed to Jesus. Eschatology helps

to distinguish between modern ideas read into Jesus' words, and theuiXe-Hvc-r,

ideas which He actually held. The whole problem is t4%et^if Jesusc*~.U

was so completely eschatological, kow could ChristianityA have de^

velopel from Him?. Brandt made this objection. Bor him, Jesus was

a teacher, and the disciples were being trained to be teachers. Het

even does away with the Triumphal Entry. He considers John's preach­

ing the event which made clear to Jesus the nearness of the Kingdom.

Jesus journeyed to Jerusalem, not to die, but to have a larger center

from which to preach. His Messianic consciousness was a high sense

of vocation to do Uod's will, but it brought about His arrest and

33

execution. The post-resurrection experiences were ecstatic, and

occurred In Galilee. However, this teaching theory raises several

problems: It receives a severe jolt from the fact that the parables

were meant to conceal as well as to reveal. Jtllicher, however,

calls this saying an innovation, and points out how clear the par­

ables actually are. Then there is the difficulty about the imme­

diate coming of the Son of Fan in Matthew 10, which Bousset solves

by rejecting the whole incident. The saying in 'It.11.1? about the

"violent" who "seize the Kingdom" causes a great deal of trouble.

It is not to be solved as Alex. Schweizer tried to do by supposing

it was the condemnation of a zealotic movement, since we have no

other reason to believe such a movement had sprung ur> from John's

preaching. But the principal problem of all trtiose raised by Weiss

is that of the Son of *4an. Just what does this expression mean?

Weiss stands out for the uanielsc meaning, without an^ attempted

apiritualisation. Bousset indeed tried to read his idea of the

Messiahship into it. in the end, it turned out to be a philological

problem, to be decided along with others from the Aramaic.

Interest in the Aramaic background of the gospels had received

fresh impetus from Kautsch's and Dalman's researches. Attempts had

even been made to retranslate the gospels into Aramaic. It was

LLetzmann's thesis in 1896 that renewed the "Son of Man" discussion.*

According to him, the Aramaic ^Jg Ij simply means "man". But

ualman, by more extensive study, showed this was not the case. TheM.

phrase "Son of Man" did have definite significance from its use in

Uaniel, although ualman fails to see how Jesus, a man on earth,

could have used it. Vertainl7 it could not have meant simply "I",

34

for v rior to oaesarea Philiprd, the apostles did not recognize jesus

as Messiah. Jesus must therefore have used the tex~i to designate

the future Messiah, and applied it to Himself in tiredicting the Pas­

sion because He was to be the future Messiah in virtue of that Pas­

sion. Where He apparently uses the term as equivalent to "I" in

other passages, it is probably a literary error of the evangelists,

who did not realize the distinction, or else a reference to the fu­

ture Messiah applied to the present man. But on the whole, Aramaic

study has yielded surprisingly little result.

A similar study of rabbinical sources yielded little more than

a number of problems, but it £oes seem to have done away tffith the

cossibility of an earthly political Messiah, since both Ezra and

Baruch show a waiting people, whose previous acts might only seem

to hinder, not help, the Kingdom. The indifference of the Psalms of

Solomon to eschatology is the same indifference which Jesus encoun­

tered in the scribes and Pharisees. They cared nothing for the

transcendental ideal of apocalyptic, but depended wholly on the Law

and the prophets to bring Israel back to God. The Similitudes of

Enoch bring in again the apocalyptic element, which entirely takes

the field in the apocalypses of Ezra and Baruch. This apocalyptic

element is entirely transcendental, and has no place for an earthly

appearance of Messiah before His appearance on the clouds of Heaven,

Nor is He expected to perform miracles, but rather to be one Himself.

The resurrection idea, too, is apocalyptic. The prophets do not

consider it, but expect the Day of the Lord in their own time. But

in apocalyptic, the Kingdom is deferred, and the righteous dead rise

to en^oy the final Kingdom of God. ^hus, Schweitzer thinks, Jesus 1

contribution was to combine the prophetic and apocalyptic concepts,

an<ff to identify the Messiah with the Son of Man, thereby placing

the pre-Messianic persecution just before the coming of the Kingdom,

and making it possible for the elect to be killed in it and still

rise into the Kingdom. Jesus' eschatology is therefore much simpler

than that of His contemporaries, the writers of IV Ezra and Baruch,

who differentiate between Messiah and Son of Man, between the Day

of the Lord and the Last Judgment, between the Messianic Kingdom

and the eternal Kingdom of God. His point of view is shown by the

question about David's son being also David's Lord, the point of

which was that the Messiah, David's Son, was the same as his Lord,

the Son of Man. Other rabbinic references to Jesus in the Talmud

are mostl-"- legendary, as is also the Toldoth Jesu, a medieval

writing.

Rudolf Seydel attempted to trace Jesus and His teaching to

Buddhist sources, but without success.

At the turn of the century, the "liberal" life of uesua was

still beinp written. H. J. Holtzmann never did write his, although

he gave manv of his ideas in his commentary on the synoptics and in

his j>iew Testament Theology. Oskar tjoltzmann, however, tried to write

a life of Jesus based on the Mardan text alone. He has a bad habit

of reading between the lines, and comes to the conclusion that Jesus

taught a new religion. His fault is that he groups his material

psychologically rather than according to context, and often the

1. The material summarized in this paragraph is taken from the later, untranslated uerman edition of the .uest. which introduces it at this TDoint. in the first edition, a much briefer treatment is found in the midst of .^chweitzer's discussion of his own view, see English edition, pp.364-36a .

facts of the narrative are sacrificed to give the "iarcan hypothesis

full play, schmidt, Schmiedel, and iron Soden all write similar lives.

They tend to know things that are not in the gospel record. They

tend, too, to reject all the eschatological material as -rythical,

and so the gospel they present is very little like "Jiark 1 3 although

they claim it is his. Moreover, they are influenced by Nietzsche to

introduce Germanic elements into their conception of Jesus wiaich do

not belong to Him at all. Pfleiderer, meanwhile, tries to give due

credit to eschatology, and ends in scepticism. Kalthoff goes fur­

ther, and even alaims that Jesus Himself is an invention of early

uhristian minds. Von Hartmann and De Jonge try to present a Jewish

Jesus, the latter basing his arguments on the Fourth Gospel.

Friedlander, like GfrOrer and Noack years before, tries to base

uhristianity on Essenism and Hellenism. *- Kirchbach too prefers

John's gospel, and spiritualizes. Many imaginative lives, based

on Venturini, and some theoso^hical lives, also appear. De Loosten,

Binet-Sangle, and others, examine Jesus psychiatric ally, and decide

He was a paranoiac or an epileptic like many other nrorhet- seers. 2

With the appearance of Wrede's Messianic oecret and Schweitzer's

Sketch, the "historical" Jesus of the "liberal11 school was m

challenged, ihough different in their solutions, these two books

present the same problem. Mark is not an historical account in the

1. This material only in the later Ger:nan edition of the 'uest.

2. Schweitzer's H.D. thesis, Die psychiatrische Beurteilung Jesu, is an attempt to show that His extraordinary attitudes and actions were not due to mental disease, but to His eschatological beliefs, which coloured His whole world of thought. Whether Schweitzer succeeds in refuting them is a matter for experts in mental studies to decide. The author of this thesis is no expert in such o being a student of theology, not of medicine or psychiatry.

37

sense that the theologians have tried to make it - it consists of a

number of stories about Jesus, without any very definite connection,

To supply this connection, modern theology has resorted to its own

more or less inspired imagination. Both Wrede and Schweitzer chal­

lenge this method and demand adherence to the text. Jesus 1 Messi­

anic secret is the new way suggested for explaining the various

incidents. Wrede, like Bauer, does not believe in the eschatology,

and supposes it to have been introduced by the evangelist. The

theory of secrecy is a literary invention to make the eschatology

more probable. Schweitzer, however, takes it as historical, and

tries to work out the details from this supposition. He goes on

to point out inconsistencies in Wfrede's theory, especially its ad­

mission of another, more trustworthy tradition. Schweitzer seizes

on this more trustworthy tradition as being that presented by Mark

and Matthew, and develops the eschatological interpretation already

worked out in the Sketch.

Since the original edition of the guest appeared, the tendency

has been to follow Wrede's attitude of scepticism, rather than

Schweitzer's emphasis on eschatology. Some go considerably far­

ther than Wrede in supposing that Jesus never existed, but that His

story is to be explained from the religious world of the time, as

known by comparative religion. There *re two lines taken by the

proponents of this view: according to Robertson, Jensen, Drews,

and others, Jesus is a mythical character, like Attis or Dionysius,

or the Persian Gilgamesch, or some of the astrological deities, and

the suggestion is made that these saviour-gods were taken over into

Christianity and adapted to fit its requirements. !.V.B.Smith and

his followers, on the other hand, believe that the stories of Jesus

were invented as symbols by a pre-uhristian gnostic sect, out of

which Christianity grew. Schweitzer finds in these theories four

main questions raised: one has to do with the philosophy of religion,

one with comparative religion, one with the history of dogma, and one

with literary history. The first is the question of Jesus' place in

uhristianity: could He possibly have acquired such a central position

in it if ne were a myth or a symbol adapted to fit the case? The

second is whether the religious world at the time of uhrist Could have

produced such a religion without such a personality as Jesus. The

third asks if uhrist is the product of uhristian ideas, instead of

tfie reverse. The fourth demands whether the New Testament documents

are purely literary inventions rather than historical records.

Schweitzer answers each question in the negative, and supports his

answers with facts much less imaginative than those supposed by the

deniers of Jesus' historicity.

During the period between the two editions (1907-1912), a number

of less startling works also appeared. There were a few lives of

Jesus, both eschatological and modern: Loisy's and Maurenbrecher 1 s

and others'. The eschatological question Wa^ treated by H.J.Holtz-

mann (Schweitzer's own professor) for the "liberal" school, and others,

noltzmann tries to do just what Schweitzer had warned could not be

done - to adort as much of the eschatologicyl view as could be ac­

cepted without destroying the present significance of the son of Man

and the Kingdom of God. England, especially, seems to have been

stirred by the Quest, for many appeared there both to defend and

to attack it. The relative value of the different synoptic gospels,

39

and the "two-source" theory of their origins, were well worked over,

and various attempts were made to prove historicity for the Fourth

Gospel. Other questions dealt with include chronology, the work of

the Baptist, the Transfiguration and Peter's confession, the Last

Supper, the Passion, and the Resurrection. But Schweitzer, having

achieved his position, does not find himself obliged to abandon it.

In conclusion, he notes that the result of research into the

Life of Jesus has been mostly negative. In its attempt to bring

Jesus into its own times, theology has loosed Him from the fetters

of dogma, and rejoieed to see Him regain a measure of life. But ag

it went deeper into the gospel story, it came face to face with the

fact that Jesus lived in a quite different world, not only as regards

historical circumstances, but also as regards religious expectations,

and Jesus retired from the present scene back to the one in which He

had lived, despite all the attempts of modern theologians to keep

Him contemporary. So it has not profited very much to learn what we

could about "Christ after the flesh". As He mattered little to Paul,

so He is really of little value to the present generation. But, pos­

itively, as we turn from the historical Jesus to the living, present

Christ of the Spirit, and absorb ourselves in Him, we learn about Him

all we need to know in order to serve Him.

d. Books on Paul.

Schweitzer's book on Paul and His Interpreters is similar to the

>uest in plan, in that it deals with the history of research into the

theology of Paul. Like the Quest, too, it Days particular attention

to the eschatological element. However, the life and thought of Jesus

are referred to only in contradistinction to Paul's. These references

are few and far between, just simply because Paul does not himself

appeal to Jesus and His teachings, but only to the death and resur­

rection of Christ.

This is also true of The iflyaticism of Paul the Apostle, although

in the latter the references are not so general; and since the book

is so recent compared with Schweitzer's other New Testament works,

they deserve attention.

The first of these references, in the fourth chapter of the

book, on The Eschatological Doctrine of Redemption, draws attention

to a common belief in angels and demons, and the idea of redemption

as a deliverance from the latter. The conception of Jesus 1 death

as a ransom is the same as that in the Sketch: that He took the pre-

Messianic tribulation upon Himself, so that His followers need not

share it. a.s for remission of sins, Jesus is undoubtedly connecting

the Kingdom which He is about to establish by His death with Jere­

miah's conception of the New Covenant (Jer.31.31-34) in which God

promises forgiveness of sins. The pre-?fessianic tribulation, which

was to atone for sin, ffesus takes upon Himself. That Jesus did not

preach this redemption has no significance - it avails for the elect

whether they know it or not.

In the following chapter, there is a reference to Jesus' view

of the End, in which He will be Messiah and Judge. It is based

largely on Enoch, and includes the victory of Messiah over His ehe-

mies the powers of Evil, and the Judgment and the eternal Kingdom.

Even those who are still living at the Uay of the Lord will expe­

rience resurrection to enter into the Kingdom. Jesus' own identity

with the Son of Man is aga~"n derived from the question about Uavid 1 s

son being also his Lord.

The religious comnunity of the elect is the subject of the t 'ird

reference, in the chapter on Christ-Mysticism. Jesus Himself preached

a kind of uhrist-Mysticism in the sense that His followers, by their

fellowship with Him in the first life will have it also in the second

with the Messiah, although tie did not explain how this would come

about, but those who were offended in Him in His humiliation could

not hope to be with Him in His glory. The pre-celebration of the

^essianic meal at the feeding of the multitude and at the Last Supper

were in token of this fellowship with Him.

In the chapter on the Spirit, both John the Baptist's and Jesus'

views are dealt with, Joel had prophesied an outpouring of the Spir­

it with the coming of the Kingdom. So John expects Jesus as the

"Coming 5ne1( to baptize with the Spirit. And Jesus thinks of His

miracles as evidence of the Spirit working through Him,

In dealing with Ifysticism and the Law, Schweitzer points out

that Jesus believed in a universal preaching of the gospel only in

the sense that the heathen elect would be made known at the Judgaant

Day. The disciples are directed to go only to Jews in their mission.

The elect are determined by whether they believe the gospel when it

is preached to them - compare Paul's doctrine of justification by

faith - and by whether they understand the parables or not. The Law

is to have effect so long as the world shall last, that is, until

the Kingdom comes.

Again on the question of Sacraments, John's and Jesus' views

are both expounded. John expected his water-baotism to. be valid

in that Jesus would baptize the same people with the Spirit, wash-

m.

ing away sin and preparing for the Judgment. Jesus Himself never seems to have used water-baptism, yet it was a sacrament in the church from the very beginning and in the same sense as John's bap­ tism. The disciples hoped likewise to impart a baptism of the Spir­ it, and He was indeed given. Jesus did not use it, not because it had no value, but because adherence to Him was all that was necessary for salvation. His sacrament is tat her that of the Last Supper, the anticipatory celebration of the Messianic meal which made partakers eligible for the real Messianic meal in the Kingdom. The petition "Give us this day our daily bread" in the Lord's prayer refers not to ordinary food, but to the Hessianic meal, according to Schweitzer, for whom €iriocw»ov ^.eans not "daily" but "coming".

In the ethical field alone, Paul refers to the dayings of Jesus, and aside from the underlying conception of repentance as the basis of ethics and love as its expression, the details differ widely just because of the difference between him and Jesus in their eschatological concepts.

In the concluding chapters of the book, Schweitzer traces his theory of the Hellenisation of Christianity which produced the gospel of John, and an account of the gospel of Jesus in the early church, showing how the eschatology dropped out of Christian teaching as the years went by.

It is evident from these references to Jesus' views how little 3chweitzer's underlying conception of the eschatoJhogical background of the life of Jesus has been altered by further study, except in minor details. It might be interesting if he could find ti;ae to

bring all his books up to date. At the same time, there would prob-

43

ably be little change, except to lengthen the two volumes dealing

with the history of research into the life of Jesus and the theology

of ^aul, in order to include more recent works on the subject, fun­

damentally, the Eschat©logical Interpretation of the Life of Jesus

would be the same as ever.

uhapter Two

SCHWEITZER AS HISTORIAN

1. History as a theological tool.

In his New Testament writings, Schweitzer is interested first

and foremost in the reconstruction of history. This is not surprising

when one considers the prevailing theological climate in which he

pursued his studies, and the special r>ersonification of it in his New

Testament professor, H. J. Holtzmann, who was one of the leading pro­

ponents of "liberal" German scholarship. 1 As Schweitzer's biographer,

George Seaver, points out:

"It must be remembered that the Quest was written forty years ago, when Protestant liberalism was at its peak."^

Schweitzer acknowledges his debt to it in these terms:

"When, at some future day, our period of civilisation shall lie', closed and completed, before the eyes of later gen­ erations, German theology will stand out as a great, unique phenomenon in the mental and spiritual life of our time, ror nowhere save in the German temperament can there be {fiound in the same perfection the living complex of conditions and fac­ tors - of philosophical thought, critical acumen, historical insight, and religious feeling - without which no deep theo­ logy is possible.

"And the greatest achievement of German theology is the critical investigation of the life of Jesus. Mat it has ac­ complished here has laid down the conditions and determined the course of the religious thinking of the future."-*

i//e may feel that he exaggerates in ascribing all these virtues

to German theologians alone, but there can be no doubt of the high

esteem in which he holds them. He regards his work as the culmina­

tion of theirs. Thus, in Das Abendmahlsproblem, he devotes 44 pages

1. See above, pp. 2-3, also pp.30 & 35.

2. Albert Schweitzer; Christian Revolutionary, p.4.

3. Quest, p.l.

45

to a critical study of their attempts to solve it, and only IS pages

to his investigation of the gospel and patristic records and his own

solution. Similarly, in the study of the life of Jesus as a whole,

the statement of his own position in the German edition of the Sketch

takes 109 pages, while his history of research into the subject in

the Quest fills 401 pages in the first edition, and 642 Pages in the

second, enlarged, as yet untranslated edition, of which only 52 pages

in the first edition, and 66 in the second, constitute a restatement

of his own views. Thus in each case he acknowledges his debt to the

uerman scholarship of which he felt himself a part, and even though

the results of his research differed so widely from theirs, the spirit

and purpose were the same.

The spirit can best be described as a determination to be "criti­

cal". It was the spirit of the times. Physical science had learned

the dangers of accepting the insights and suppositions of past ages

on authority. The Copernican theory of the universe had completely

superseded the ancient view that the earth was flat, and that sun,

moon, and start revolved about it. The Darwinian theory of evolution,

supported by the findings of geology and archeology, had shaken theol­

ogy out of its literal adherence to the Biblical account of creation.

The 18th-century "enlightenment" had insisted on the primacy of human

reason. All this had an unsettling influence on the study of the New

Testament. NO longer were theologians willing to accent any teaching

of the Church on the authority of the past. Bach doctrine must be

subjected to the most unrelenting scrutiny, and tested experimentally

wherever possible. And if it could not be scientifically established,

then, no matter how precious a matter of faith it might be, it was

46

discarded. This demanded a certain ruthlessness - in fact, Schweitzer

suggests that for this task, hate might be a more useful motive than

love:

"For hate as well as love can write a Life of Jesus, and the greatest of them are written with hate: that of Reimarus, the Wolfenbuttel Fragmentist, and that of uavid Friederich otrauss. it was not so much hate of the Person of Jesus as of the supernatural nimbus with which it was so easy to surround Him, and with which we had in fact been surrounded. They were eager to picture Him as truly and purely human, to strip from Him the robes of splendour with which He had been apparilled, and clothe Him once more with the coarse garments in which He had walked in Galilee." 1

But many who loved Jesus also wrote Lives. That it took courage,

great courage, to be as ruthless as seemed required, is stated thus:

"Those who tried to bring Jesus to life at the call of love, found it a cruel task to be honest. The critical study of the life of Jesus has been for theology a school of honesty. The world has never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the Lives of Jesus of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record. One must read the successive Lives of Jesus with which Hase followed the course of the study from the 'twenties to the 'seventies of the nineteenth century to get an inkling of what it must have cost the men who lived through that decisive period really to maintain that 'cou­ rageous freedom of investigation' which the great Jena pro­ fessor, in the preface of his first Life of Jesus, claims for his researches. One sees in him the marks of the strug­ gle with which he gives up, bit by bit, things which, when he wrote that preface, he never dreamed he would have to surrender."^

Of necessity, this "critical" spirit had a marked effect on the

works produced. Schweitzer observes two periods, which he calls the

"rationalistic", before Strauss, and the "liberal" or "modern", since

his time. But actually each of these adjectives is characteristic

in greater or less degree of the whole movement. In the first pe-

riod, the rationalism ca rie to the fore because:

1. yuest, pp. 4-5*

2. Quest, pp.5-6.

iff"The dominant interest in the first (period) is the question of miracle. What terms are possible between a historical treatment and the acceptance of supernatual events? With the advent of Strauss this problem found a solution, viz. , that these events have no rightful place in the history, but are simply mythical elements in the sources."^

Yet the same rationalistic spirit is also characteristic of the sec­

ond period, in which Jesus was considered siranly as a human being,

and the problem of His life was to explain the causal connection be­

tween the separate recorded events of His life. Thus history was

expected to explain the outward causation, and psychology the rea­

sons for His thoughts. A typical problem was

"the concurrence in Jesus of an ethical with an eschatologi- cal line of thought.. , . . How can two such different views of the world, in part diametrically opposed to one another, be united in one process of thought?"^

The usual solution was reached either by

"eliminating altogether eschatology from the field of Jesus' thought "3,

or

"by sublimating the eschatology, as though Jesus had trans­ lated the realistic conceptions of His time into spiritual terms by using theia in a figurative sense, "^

This resulted in reducing Him to a teacher - no doubt the greatest

teacher who ever lived, but no more than that - whom His disciples,

inspired by faith in His resurrection, had deified as the Jewish

Messiah.

The first neriod was also just as "liberal" as the second, in

1. ..uesT, p. 10*

2. Sketch, p. &4.

3. Sketch, p. 84.

4. Sketch, p.

that in both .men's minds sought freedom to reiect any accepted dogma

of the Church which did not seem true in the light of their research,tThus Reimarus pointed out that

"The genuineness ofi/the command to baptize in Matt.28.19 is questionable, not only as a saying ascribed to the risen Jesus, but also because it is universal!stic in outlook, and because it implies the doctrine of the Trinity, and consequently, the metaphysical Divine Sonship of Jesus."^

This differs in degree, but not in kind, from the attempt of

"modern theology ... to read between the lines a whole host of things, and those often the most important, and then to foist them upon the text by means of psychological conjecture,"^

Schweitzer himself is not immune from such faults, as is shown by his

own rearrangement of the central chapters of iark's gospel to suit

his theories.3 In fact, the liberal theologians were willing to make

any experiment which offered any Drospect of yielding further know­

ledge. They had infinite faith in the value of absolute truth, or,

to use Schweitzer's words:

"In the study of the Life of Jesus it (i.e., German theology) was working for the future - in pure faith in the truth, not seeing whereunto it wrought."^-

Likewise, both periods are "modern" in spirit: in each?-scholars

were attempting to reinterpret the gospel data in terms which their

own age could understand. They conceived their task as the recon­

struction of the gospel history, on the assumption that the more

could be historically known about Jesus, the more intelligible He

would become. They supposed that

1. Quest, p.

2. vuest, p. 330.

3. See Sketch, ch. 7, and uest, pp. 330-384.

4. '..uest, p. 2.

"Jesus would mean more to our time by entering into it as a man like ourselves." 1

Indeed, Schweitzer intimates that thev were obsessed with the idea.

"The thought that we could build UD by the increase of histo­ rical knowledge a new and vigorous Christianity, and set free new spiritual forces, rules us like a fixed idea."

In his pref^ace to his earliest New Testament book, Das Abendmahls-

problem, which has not been translated into English, he wrote:

"Wir mussen an die Geschichte glauben, d.h. wir mtissen der Zuversicht sein, dass mit dem Fortschritt der geschicht- lichen Erkenntnis zugleich die vertiefung und Einigung in Ulauben notwendig verbunden ist, obwohl es manchmal vorerst nicht den Anschein hat."3

* By the time he wrote the Quest, however, he appears to be aware

that the historical method has definite limitations, at least as to

its results. So he remarks:

"There is nothing more negative than the result of the cri­ tical study of the life of Jesus."^

Like the others, he had planned to write a Life of Jesus. He says

as much in the preface to the sketch;

"I publish this new view as a sketch, since it belongs of necessity within the frame of this work on the Lord's Supt>er. I hope, however, from the criticism of its gemeralllines to reach greater clearness with regard to many exegetical de­ tails before I can think of giving these thoughts definite shape in an elaborated 'Life of Jesus' .»'

But he never did get around to writing it, The Quest contains

an even briefer statement of his position than the Sketch. In the

meantime, he had apparently come to the conclusion that to pmblish

1. Quest, p. 397,

2. ibid., p. 393.

3. Das Abendmahlsproblem, p. xi.

4. ' uest, p. 396.

5. Sketch, p, 7,

50

a Life of Jesus would serve no good purpose, for he writes in the

closing chapter of the uuestt

"Whatever the ultimate solution may be, the historical Jesus of Whom the criticism of the future, taking as its starting-point the problems which have been regognized and admitted, will draw the portrait- . , . He will not be a Jesus Christ to 7/hom the religion of the present can as­ cribe, according to its long-cherished custom, its own thoughts and ideas. .... The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma.

"The study of the life of Jesus has had a curious his­ tory. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found tiim it could bring Him straight into our time as a 'Jtecher and Saviour. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and move­ ment coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to metet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own ... by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendu­ lum returns to its original position."1

This last paragraph is quoted in a number of books written about

Schweitzer, and rightly so. Not only does it explain the English

title, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, but it shows in what sense

Schweitzer considers his work the culmination of nineteenth-Century

lierman research. Like the others, he had started out on the "quest".

Like them, he had sought Jesus through historical criticism. But

because he had been "thoroughgoing", to use his own word, and car­

ried his research to its logical conclusion, he had given the coup

de grAce to the whole movement. A completely human, entirely under­

standable Jesus is of no great value as an obiect of worship, because

his humanitjjniakes Him subject to error - the overwhelming error of

living His life and dying His death on the uross for the sake of a

parousia which did not take place then, and has not yet taken place,

and in which many ohrlstians no longer believe, at least in the im-

1. Quest, pp.396-397.

51

mediate sense in which he did.

This is not to say, however, that schweitzer renounces the his­

torical research of which his own work was a part, un the contrary,

he still believes it has value, for he goes oni

"It is impossible to over-estimate the value of what Ger­ man research unon the life of Jesus has accomplished. It is a uniquely great expression of sincerity, one of the most signi­ ficant events in the whole mental and spiritual life o r human­ ity. What has been done for the religious life of the present and immediate future by the modern-liberal and popularising research, in spite of all its errors, only becomes evident when one examines the literature and social culture of the Latin nations, who have been scarcely if at all touched by the influence of these thinkers."^

One of the chief values which Schweitzer claims for his own his­

torical research is that it has restored to Jesus the greatness which

is His due. He even states it as the aim of the Sketch:

"to depict the figure of Jesus in its overwhelming heroic greatness and to impress it upon the modern age and the mod­ ern theology."^

To many, however, it seems as if he had not restored it, but destroyed

the last vestige of it. For if Jesus really did believe, as Schweitzer

asserts, that the Kingdom of God would come in an apocalyptic fashion,

first at the harvest-time before the twelve apostles returned from

their preaching mission, and then later immediately following His own

death, He was mistaken in both cases. The glorious Messianic con­

sciousness, which Schweitzer claims to have restored to Him, is so

linked with the Kingdom which was not, and still is nfct, realized,

that it can hardly be considered a basis for heroic greatness. And

1. Quest", pp. 397-395, the last sentence altered to confer a to the more recent merman edition, p. 632,

2. sketch, p. 274.

52

if He were mistaken about these matters which lay at the heart and

core of what he believed and taught and lived and died for, then

what assurance is there that He was right about anything else, even

His expectation to be the Messiah? That He should have been mis­

taken about some minor detail would not destroy His authority in

the fundamentals of the ohristian religion, r'or instance, if it

could be proved that He shared the belief of His contemporaries that

the earth was flat, that would not nrevent us from trusting in Him

for salvation from sin, or following nis etMcal teachings, but if

the Kingdom of (jrcd, in the apocalyptic sense, was the aim and pur­

pose of His whole human existence, then Its failure to appear nul­

lifies what He stood for, and He is proved, to say the least, un­

reliable. These considerations have caused many to take serious

offence at Schweitzer's work.

Schweitzer was well aware that his views might cause offence.

He sought to guard against it in Das Abendmahlsproblem, in the pre­

face of which he compares the fate of Grafe and Schleiermacher, who

held similar views about the Last Supper, but one was condemned for

his views, while the other was praised for his, and remarks:

"Es ist merkwlirdig: In der Theologie darf heutzutage einer fast alles sagen, was er will, wenn er es nur vornehm und geistreich mit einem gewissen eleganten Ske£tizismus thut. irttr den ehrlichen Menschen, der redet, weil sein Gewissen ihn zwingt, ist man a.ber unnachsichtlich."!

Later on, he defends himself by this paragraph:

"Diese kurzen Andeutungen mttgen zeigen, dass diese Ar- beit in einem praktisch aufbauenden und versohnenden Geiste geschrieben ist. Zwar wird man, von den gewohnten Auffas- sungen herkommend, zunachst mannigfach an dieser Unter- suchung Anstoss nehmen, da sie die Verstthnung nicht durch

1. Das Abendmahlsproblem, p. vii.

eine neue vermengung oder Verdunkelung, sondern einzig und allein durch geschichtliche vfahrhaftigkeit und Unbefangenheit herbeifuhren will."1

In other words, he is trying to lay the blame on history, which drives

him to his conclusions. The "postscript" to the Sketch, in which he

sets forth the aim of that book - to restore Jesus' overwhelming

heroic greatness - is written in the same spirit,

"The judgments passed upon this realistic account of the life of Jesus may be very diverse, according to the dogmatic, historical, or literary point of view of the critics. Only with the aim of the book may they not find fault." 2

But by the time he came to write the Quest, his attitude had

changed somewhat. Here he makes such a statement as this:

"We must be prepared to find that the historical knowledge of the personality and life of Jesus^will not be a help, but perhaps even an offence to religion."^

He points out that others before him have given offence, and adds:

"They advanced the study of the subject more than all the others put together. But for the offence which they gave, the science of historical theology would not have stbod where it does today."^

One even wonders if he may not be referring to himself by implica­

tion in these remarkable sentences:

"We have not yet arrived at any reconciliation between half­ way history and half-way thought. What the ultimate goal towards which we are moving will be, what this something is which shall bring new life and new regulative principles to coming centuries, we do not know. We can only dimly divine that it will be the mighty deed of some mighty original gen­ ius, whose truth and Tightness will be proved by the fact that we, working at our poor half thing, will oppose him might and main - we who imagine we long for nothing more

1. Das Abendmahlsproblem, p, xi.

2. Sketch, p. 274.

3. Quest, p. 399-

4. ibid., p. 5»

54

eagerly than a genius powerful enough to open up with authority a new path for the world, seeing that we cannot succeed in moving it forward along the track which we have so laboriously prepared."I

In any case, there can be no doubt that in Schweitzer's view the

"modern-liberal" theology did less than justice to Jesus, He had in­

deed been freed from the bonds of dogma, but now modern theology was

trying to make its own bonds to hold Him in our time.

"There was a danger that we should offer them a Jesus Who was too small, because we had forced Him into conformity with our human standards and human psychology. .... It is nothing less than a misfortune for modern theology that it mixes history with everything and ends by being proud of the skill with which it finds its own thoughts T . . in Jesus, and represents Him as expressing them."2

In the later edition of the Quest, he puts it even more strongly, and

calls it "historical scholasticism":

"Vver zu Anfang der neunziger Jahre des letzten Jahr- hunderts - zur Zeit als die Richtung der Fahrt definitiv festgelegt wurde - in die Theologie eintrat und ein nuch- ternes Urteil bewahrte, hatte das beangstigende Empfinden, dass der Unterricht der zuktinftigen Geistlichen seinem Wesen nach in der Hauptsache aus kritischer Geschichts- scholastik bestand, in der sie zwar zu historischem ror- schen und Urteilen erzogen, im Ubrigen aber, da Geschichte eben alles war, religitts verbildet warden."3

Tlius, when Schweitzer speaks of restoring to Jesus His lost

greatness, he means that he has contributed to the downfall of that

"liberal" view which belittled Him:

"It was no small matter, therefore, that in the course of the critical study of the Life of Jesus, after a resisfc- iance lasting for two generations, during which first one expedient was tried and then another, theology was forced by genuine history to begin to doubt the artificial his-

1. Quest, p. 2.

2. ibid., pp.393-399.

3. Quest, later German edition, p. 509

55

tory with which it had thought to give new life to our Christ­ ianity, and to yield to the facts which, a~ '/rede strikingly said, are sometimes the most radical critics of all. History will force it to find a way to transcend history, and to fight for the lordship and rule of Jesus over this world with weapons tempered in a different forge."1

It will be objected at this point that in destroying the "modern"

Jesus, Schweitzer gives us an "eschatological" Jesus who is no greater,

Schweitzer is aware of this difficulty, and sets out to deal with it:

"The historical foundation of Christianity as built up by rationalistic, bv liberal, ahd by modern theology no longer exists; but that does not mean that Christianity has lost its historical foundation. The work which historical theology thought itself bound to carry out, and which fell to nieces just as it was nearing completion, was only the brick facing of the real immovable historical foundation which is inde­ pendent of any historical confirmation or justification.

"Jesus means something to our world because a mightv spiritual force streams forth from Him and flows through our time also. This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery. It is the solid foundation of Christianity."2

So the "historical Jesus", whom he has taken such pains to de­

scribe,, is after all not so important. Yet he does not differentiate,

as Strauss had done, between the Jesus of history and the christ of

faith. Strauss sought, by Hegelian dialectic, to show that

"G-odpmanhood, the highest idea conceived by human thought, is actually realized in the historic personality of Jesus."^

But Schweitzer is a follower of Kant, not Hegel, and to him the re­

lationship is quite different. To express this relationship is the

purpose of the concluding chapter of the Quest. He apparently real­

ized that he had not made himself quite clear in the first edition.

1. uest, p. 399-

2. ibid., p. 397.

3. Quest, p. 79. for Schweitzer's discussion of this point made by Strauss, see ucst, pp.114-115.

56

«Kor in the second, he rewrote a whole section, rer?lacin£ two pages

of the earlier edition by more than nine in the later one.-*-

In the first edition, Schweitzer explains it this

"It is not Jesus as historically known, but Jesus as spiritually arisen within men, who is significant for our time and can help it. wot the historical Jesus, but. the spirit which goes £atrth from Him and in the spirits of men strives for new influence and rule, is that which overcomes the world.

"It is not given to history to disengage that which is abiding and eternal in the being of Jesus from the histori­ cal forms in which it worked itself out, and to introduce it into our world as a living influence. It has toiled in vain at this undertaking. As a water-slant is beautiful so long as it is growing in the water, but once torn from its roots, withers and becomes unrecognisable, so it is with the historical Jesus when He is wrenched loose from the soil of eschatology, and the attempt is made to conceive Him 'historically1 as a Being not subject to temporal conditions. The abiding and eternal in Jesus is absolutely independent of historical knowledge and can only be understood by con­ tact with His spirit which is still at work in the world. In proportion as we have the spirit of Jesus we have the true knowledge of Jesus.

"Jesus as a concrete historical personality remains a stranger to our time, but His spirit, which lies hidden in

* His words, is known in simDlicity, and its influence is direct. Every saying contains in its own way the whole Jesus. The very strangeness and unconditionedness in which He stands before us makes it easier for individuals to find their own standpoint in regard to Him."^

But only in the second edition does he give the key to this spirit­

ual relationshin. It is a matter of the will, which is not affected

by the passage of time and the change of circumstances:

"Every full view of li^e, cosmic philosophy, Weltan­ schauung (the German word ife is impossible to translate) contains side by side elerateats which are conditioned by the age as well as others which are unconditioned, for

1. P£. 399 (3rd paragraph) to 401 (2nd paragraph) of the English edi­ tion are reulaced by pp. 633 (last paragraph) to 642 (2nd paragraph) of the later uerman edition. Much of this material is quoted by Lowrie in the translator's introduction to the English edition of the Sketch, and this translation is used frequently in the next few pages of this thesis.

2. f<uest, ttnglisfe ed., pp. 399-400,

It consists in the very fact that a penetrating will has per­ vaded and constituted the conceptual material furnished it by history. This latter is subjected to change. Hence there is no Weltanschauung, however great and profound it mav be, which does not contain perishable material, but the will itself is timeless. It reveals the unsearchable and pri nary nature of a person and determines also the final and fundamental defini­ tion of his Weltanschauung. May the conceptual material alter never so much, with consequent diversity between the new Welt-

ng and the old, yet these in reality only lie just sofar apart PS the wills which constitute them diverge in di­ rection. "1

The "historical Jesus" expressed His timeless will in the eschato-

logical terminology of the time in which He lived on earth simply

because as a man living then, He thought in those terms. \ie live in

quite 6 different age, and our whole thought-world is different. That

is why the historical Jesus seems so alien to us. And it is dangerous

to try to translate from His thought -world into ours.

"Jesus' deed consists in the fact that His original and profound moral nature took possession of the late-Jewish es- chatology 'and so gives expression, in the thought material of His age, to the hope and the will which are intent uioon the ethical consummation of the world. All attempts to avert one's vision from this We It ansc hauung as a whole and to make Jesus' significance for us to consist in His revelation of the 'fatherhood of God', the 'brotherhood of man', and so forth, must therefore of necessity lead to a narrow and pe­ culiarly insipid conception of His religion. In reality He is an authority for us, not in the sphere of knowledge, but only in the matter of the will. "2

Schweitzer makes a good deal of the will as the only Dossible bridge

between Jesus' time and ours:

"Es handelt sich urn ein verstehen von »»ille zu Wille, bei dem das wesentliche der Weltanschauung unmittelbar ge- geben ^st. Jiin ins Kleine gehendes Scheiden zwischen ver- ganglichem lind Bleibendem in seiner Erscheinung und seiner verMJndigung 1st unntttig. .lie von selbst Uhersetzen sich seine worte in die jrorm, die sie in unserem vorstellungs- material annehmen mftssen. Viele, die auf den ersten Blick

1. Quest, Ger.ed., p. 634, translated in jketch, jtt.ng.ed.,pp 46-47

2. ibid.. pp.635-69 6, translated in aketch, Eng.ed., ^.49-50.

fremd anmuten, werden in einem tiefen und eirigen Sinne auch fur uns wahr, wenn man der uewalt des ueistes, der aus ihnen redet, nicht Eintra? su tun sucht. Fast mttchte man gegen die Sorgen, vde seine Verktindigung fur moderne ~'renschen verstandlich und lebendig gemacht werden kftnnte, sein Wort 'Trachtet am ersten nach dem Reiche Gottes und nach seiner Gerechtlgkeit, so wird euch dies alles zufalien' in Erinnerung bringen,"

So Schweitzer renounces all attempts to explain what Jesus' message

for our time must be, and falls back upon mysticism:/

"In the last resort,our relationship to Jesus is of a mystical sort. No personality of the past can be installed in the present by historical reflection or by affirmations about His authoritative significance. Vie get into relation with Him only when we are brought together in the recognition of a. common will, experience a clarification, enrichment, and quickening of our will by His, and find ourselves in Him. In this sense every deeper relationship between men is of a mystical sort. Our religion, therefore, so far as it proves itself specifically Christian, is not so :nuch 'Jesus-cult' as 'Jesus-mystic'."2

Schweitzer has himself achieved this mystical relationship to

Jesus in his own personal religious life. This appears clearly in

his understanding of Paul's relationship to Christ as expressed in

his ? fysticism of Paul the Apostle, though etoen in the Pauline work

he finds an eschatological motive which is now no longer tenable.

But his mysticism is strong enough to be the answer to the problem

which has often been seen in his life: how is it possible for one

who believed Jesus to have been so thoroughly mistaken about the

time and manner of the manifestation of the Kingdom of God still

to be such a great Christian as to give up all the earthly success

which he erroyed as a musician, a philosopher, and a theologian,

to go to live a life of sacrificial service among largely unap-

preciative African natives? He could, and did, because uhrist

1. Quest, Ger.ed., p. 639, not translated in Sketch, Eng.ed.

2. uest, Ger.ed., p. 641, translated in Sketch, Eng.ed.,pp.55-56.

means so much more to him than the ''historical Jesus". This is what

he is trying to express in the oft-quoted concluding paragraph of

the uest, which is the same in both editions:

"He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: 'Follow thou Me! 1 and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill in our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is . . . "

To sum up, then, history, according to Schweitzer, is a most

valuable tool for theology, if confined to its proper use. In a

metaphor of the sort which he so frequently uses, it is a sharp-

edged tool like the scalpel, which is of such value in surgery.

But it is a cutting tool. Of itself it cannot heal any disease.

It can only enable the surgeon to reach an infected part and re­

move it. After that, the surgeon may stitch up the woundt, and

may apply medicine, but in the last analysis it is God who heals

the incision, and effects the cure.2

2. Schweitzer's historical method.

while Schweitzer was, as we have seen, a firm believer in the

"critical-historical" method into which, so to speak, he was born,

yet his own individual application of it has some remarkable feat­

ures which deserve further examination, for Schweitzer is an in-

1. Quest, p. 401.

2. For a more recent, broader interpretation of history, see Dodd's History and the Gospel, esp. pp. llff., 25ff., l66ff., 131-132. Dodd observes a revolt against the ' historicisna' represented by Schweitzer and the theologians he so much admired, and insists that history includes not only the facts which took place in the past, but also the meaning they have for us today*

60

dependent, creative thinker, and could not be bound by any school of thought. He soon found himself dissatisfied with many of the findings of the liberal school. This dissatisfaction drove him to be as criti­ cal of liberalism as liberalism itself was critical of orthodoxy, and to what can only be described as a certain glee at the victory he felt he had achieved over the "liberal-historical" view of the life of Jesus. This attitude is most obvious in chapter AIX of the Quest, where he describes how

"the literary and the eschatological view, which have hitherto been marching parallel, on either flank, to the advance of mod­ ern theology, have now united their forces, brought theology to a halt, surrounded it, and compelled it to give battle."1

Even more supercilious is the suggestion further on that

"Modern historical theology ... is warned that the dyke is letting in water and sends a couple of masons to repair the leak; as if the leak did not mean that the whole masonry is undermined, and must be rebuilt from the foundation."^

On top of this, his third metaphor is quite gratuitous:

"Theology comes home to find the broker's marks on all the furniture and goes on as before quite comfortably, ignoring the fact that it will lose everything if it does not pay its debts."3

theology's big mistake, accordigg to Schweitzer, is not its scientific method, but the fact that it did not carry it to its logical conclusion. Its results are unsatisfactory because they

raise as many problems as they solve. In this same chapter AlX of the Quest, he lists two full pages of these unsolved Droblems. In eleven paragraphs, 4& sentences in all, only two do not end with a question-mark, and these are quotations from Wrede.^

1. Quest, p. 329. 3. Quest, p. 330.

2. ibid., p. 329. 4. ibid., pp.334-336.

This tour fle force is, in fact, quite typical of Schweitzer,

He seems to have a special gift for discovering unsolved problems.

He tracks them down with all the zest of the hero of a mystery

novel hunting for clues. And he shows the most amazing skill in

fitting them all together until he forms of them some apparently

insoluble dilemma, rrom this point of view, Das Abendmahlsproblem

is a most fascinating oiece of work. Here the dilemma is: which­

ever is stressed, the fact that Jesus took bread and wine and of­

fered them as His body and His blooft, or the fact that the disciples

shared in the elements, no satisfactory explanation can be made for

both the original Last Supper and the celebration of communion in>2

the early church. Then, having stated the r>roblem in these terms.

Schweitzer solves it in his own characteristic fashion, He makesVf

an entirely new supposition, that the comparison^the bread and wine

with the body and blood of Jesus is only secondary, and that the

supper was intended as a sort of pre-celebration of the Messianic

banquet in the Kingdom of God, whereby the disciples who partook

were made in a special sense members of the Kingdom, so that they

would have a place at the real Messianic meal when it took place»

This seems to Schweitzer to exnlain both the original Last Supper

and also the fact that the early church continued to celebrate it

even though Jesus gave them nd specific command to do so. it isA

just as neat as that'.s*

Similarly, the sketch is a solution to a practically insoluble

1. see above, pp. 12-13.

2. Das Abendmahlsproblem, pp..37ff.

3* But see below, p. 131.

62

problem:

"The last years of research have revealed on what slight grounds our historical conception of the life of Jesus really rests. It cannot be concealed that we are confronted by a difficult antinomy. Either Jesus really took nimself to be the Messiah, or (as a new tendency of the study now seems to suggest) this dignity was first ascribed to nim. by the eerTy uhurch. In either case, the "Life of Jesus" remains equally enigmatical."-*-

The whole preface is the statement of this ^roblem. And Schweitzer

solves it by

"commencing not at the beginning, but in the middle, with the thought of the Passion." 2

This leads him to his eschatological interpretation of the life of

Jesus, with its three secrets, the Mystery of the Kingdom of God,

the Mystery of the Messiahship, and the Mystery of the Passion.

Again the riddle is declared solved: the reason Jesus did not seem

to believe Himself to be the Messiah, although the early Church

ascribed that dignity to Him from the first, is that ne did not

make a public claim to it, because He understood it in an anti­

cipatory sense - He was not yet the Messiah, but would be re­

vealed as such when He came on the clouds of Heaven at the corning

of the Kingdom. But the secret became known, first at the trans­

figuration to Peter, James and John, then by Peter's confession

to all the twelve, and finally through Judas' betrayal to the high

priest, who used it to condemn Jesus to death for blasphemy.

Schweitzer's solutions are so ingenious and startling, and

claim to explain so many problems, that one's first natural re­

action is to doubt them, or at best to accept them with extreme

1. Sketch, pp.3-4*

2. ibid. t p, 3.

63

caution and reserve. But Schweitzer has no fear of logical conse­

quences. Once he has found the "key" to his dilemma, he goes on to

apply it to every detail. For him this is just being "thorough­

going11 - 1 It is just pressing things to their ultimate logical

conclusions. That is why his treatment of the "modern-liberal"

view seems so much like a reductio ad absurdum. Even the flact that

the result may seem absurd does not deter him. In this he considers

himself a true disciple of Kant, for he quotes in the Sketch, the

following paragraph from the Critique of Practical Reason:

"Let it be the maxim in every scientific investigation for one to pursue undisturbed the due course of it with all possible exactitude and frankness, not considering what it may collide with outside of its own field, but following it out, so far as one can, truly and completely for itself a- lone. frequent observation has convinced me that when one has brought this task to an end, that which in the midst of it appeared to me for the time being very questionable with respect to other teaching outside, if only I closed my eyes to this questionableness and attended merely to my task till it was finished, finally in unexpected wise proved to be in perfect agreement with those very teachings, - though the truth had presented itself without the least reference to those teachings, without partiality and prejudice for them. 1' 2

This principle even seems at times to colour Schweitzer's his­

torical criteria. For instance, he begins the last chapter of Das

Abendmahlsproblem with this statement:?

"Authentisch ist ein Bericht, welcher in keiner Weise durch die Vorstellung von der Gemeindefeier beeinflusst ist. Der Markusbericht ist authentisch, weil sich dieser Nachweis ftir ihn ftihren

1. The German word is konsequent, which implies not only thorough­ ness, but necessary causations well.

2. Critique of Practical Reason, Ger.ed., p. 129, footnote, quoted in Sketch, Eng.ed., pp.120-121.

3. Das Abendmahlsproblem, p. 56,

64

This seems to say, "That record is historical which fits my theory."

One sometimes finds that attitude in practice among his predecessors,

but never stated as a principle. Actually, a closer study of the

three preceding chapters, in which he has been studying the records,

reveals that Schweitzer is not here stating a principle, but a con­

clusion, following a recognized principle of textual criticism: that

the authentic record is the one which is hardest to explain.

Similarly, in the preface to the Sketch, he lays down the cri­

terion:

"Only that conception is historical which makes it intelligible how Jesus could take Himself to be the Messiah without finding Himself obliged to make this consciousness of nis tell as a factor in His public ministry for the Kingdom of uod, - rather, how He was actually compelled to make the Messianic dignity of His person a secret I M ^

This certainly seems to beg the question. But again the impression

is created by citing the sentence ofit of context. What Schweitzer

is trying to do here is to find the "key" to the problem, and define

it, not to state a general principle applicable to all historical

research.

Nevertheless, this teenchant, almost blunt, way of expressing

himself is at least one reason why Schweitzer met with so much op­

position. He himself is so surely convinced of the power of reason

and the inevitable discovery of truth, nleasant or unpleasant, that

he takes no pains to make his theories palatable to his readers.

Lowrie suggests this in his translator 1 s introduction to the sketch;

w "Unquestionably it is no easy matter to assimilate so novel and striking a view as that of Schweitzer. TO bring it into relation with the presuppositions of our religious view in general involves demolition and reconstruction - a labour heavy and grievous to the soul. The mind instinct

1. Sketch, p. 6.

65

tively recoils from such a labour and is fain to protect it­ self by a general repudiation and denial. Moreover the author has presented his view with a naked simplicity w&icfr, while it renders it easier to understand and more difficult to con­ fute, makes it also, one must confess, more difficult to, ac­ cept. We are not inclined to accept opinions in the face of a display of force, and as it were at the muzzle of a gun - even when the gun is loaded with logic."^

0 He especially objects to the implication

"that every trait of jesus' life and teaching was coloured by it (i.e., eschatology) and that He Himself was so obsessed by a single idea that He was unable to see things as they are. This is precisely what the Gospels do not permit us to be­ lieve. It is manifest that Jesus had a peculiarly acute sensibility to His surroundings, whether it were nature or human society, and responded feelingly, spontaneously. His sense of right and wrong is so clearly intuitive that He could deal sovereignly with the Law." 2

Yet at the same time one cannot help admiring the drive of Schweitzer 1 s

logic. It brooks no resistance, simply because he is so confident of

his "practical reason"!

This is all the more remarkable when one considers Schweitzer's

own estimate of his premises, and the experimental nature of his re­

search. In his careful statement of "The Problem" in the first

chapter of the Quest, he makes this quite clear:

"The problem of the life of Jesus has no analogue in the field of history..... The standards of ordinary historical science are here inadequate, its methods not immediately ap­ plicable. The historical study of the life of Jesus has had to create its own methods for itself. . . . All that can be done is to experiment continuously, starting from definite assumptions; and in this experimentation the guiding prin­ ciple must ultimately rest uuon historical intuition. "3

This is, in essence, Schweitzer's method, as he considers it also

that of his predecessors. The "historical intuition" on which he

depends is a new element beyond the bounds of pure reason, though

1. Sketch, Eng. ed., p. 37.9* Quest, p. 6.

2. ibid., pp.38-39.

66

not perhaps beyond the limits of what he considers admissible in

the Kantian practical reason. 1 *Jow the experimental method is,

of course, an approved scientific method, and it had led, in

other fields, to important advances in scientific *C>LOV--ledge. ViTe

might therefore expect that it would yield valuable results in the

study of the life of Jesus as well. An experiment can be judged,

however, only by its results. There must be some adequate stan­

dard by which to determine whether it has succeeded or not. ihis

standard is usually other knowledge in the same field previously

and independently acquired. And until the results of the experi­

ment have thus been carefully checked, the scientific procedure

is to consider them hypothetical, because they are based on an

unproved theory. Schweitzer's "historical intuitions" are such

unproved theories unless and until they can be proved by their

results, he is right in demanding that they be carried to their

logical conclusions, but not in assuming that such a procedure

of itself guarantees the truth of the theories on wuich it is

based. His mistake is therefore not in his experimental method,

but in the certainty he claims for his results*

Me relies very largely on these "historical intuitions" for

the discovery of the "keys" by which he solves his fundamental

problems. Ratter, in his Albert .Schweitzer, calls him"one of

the Illuminati", and points out:

"Though his scholarship is profound, also provocative, his true claim to be heard is that primarily he is a vision­

ary, a mystic, giving form and scholarship to his illumina­ tions. This can be most readily proven, for all his major

1. See quotation fron Kant above, p. 63.

67

books are the working out of an illumination. His under­ standing of Bach as a tone painter came to him as a very young man; a flash of intuitive insight gave hi::t his under­ standing of Jesus ahd Paul, before he was aged twenty-three; his conviction that we are a generation of caim-followers, Epigoni, came to him suddenly in the course of conversation when he was aged twenty-four; his mystic formula 'Reverence for Life 1 with its key-word 'responsibility' was given as a revelation in Africa. . . « , But though he is a mystic subject to illuminations, his scholarship should not be discounted: though secondary in him frequently it is equal to the scholarship of others*"^

Schweitzer's own description of how he discovered the phrase "Reve­

rence for Life", which is the "kev" to his ethics, shows clearly how

he depended on this intuition or illumination. Again he was up

against a seemingly insoluble problem, and for months as he worked

as a mission doctor in Africa, his mind cast about for a solution.

Tren, one evening, as he sat on the deck of a barge which was taking

him to patients up the Ogowe River, it came to him:

"Tost in thought I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal conception of the ethical which I had not discovered in any philosophy. Sheet after sheet I covered with disconnected sentences, merely to keep myself concentrated on the problem. Late on the third day, at the moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind^ unforeseen and unsbught, the phrase, 'Reverence for Life'. The iron door had ^ielded: the path in the thicket had be­ come visible. Now I had found my way to the idea in which world- and life-affirmation and ethics are contained side by side! Now I knew that the world-view of ethical world- and life-affirmation, together with its ideals of civilisation, is founded in thought'." 2

The "key" to the eschatological interpretation of the life of

Jesus had been discovered years before in a similar manner.3 Having

1. Magnus C. Ratter, Albert Schweitzer, pp. 237-238. In the sen­ tences omitted above, Ratter cites no less than eight separate "illuminations" which Schweitzer records in his autobiographical writings, Memoirs of childhood and Youth, and My Life and Thought.

2. My Life and Thought, pp. 1<* 5-186.

3. see above, pp. 2-q .

come to an impasse on the meaning of Jesus' life as recorded by 'ark,

he found the "kev" in the speeches of Jesus recorded by ^iatthew:

the conrrission to the twelve when they were first sent out two by

two, in Vlatthew 10; and the reply to the messengers of John the Bap- 11:

tist in chapter 11. He noticed that Jesus seemed to expect the

Kingdom to come in an apocalyptic forr^ with Himself revealed

Messiah, before the disciples returned from their 'nission. All the

rest of the eschatological interpretation of the life of Jesus has

been worked out from that basis.

Yet it must be admitted that once cichweitzer has his "key", he

is as rigorously logical as possible in the application of it to

the problem, and the resulting solution. And it is remarkable how

many problems of detail in the text seem to fall into line with

the solution of the main problem.

Schweitzer also admits an awareness of the difficulties in­

volved

"in the nature of the sources of the life of Jesus, and in the character of our knowledge of the contemporary religiou3 world of thought."-^

He makes some very damaging concessions on both counts.

with regard to the sources:

"We have not the materials for a complete life of Jesus, but only for a picture of His public ministry."

let he asserts:

"There are few characters of antiquity about whom we possess so much indubitablv historical information, of whon we have so many authentic discourses. . . . Jesus stands

1. Quest, p. 6.

2. ibid., p. 6.

69

before us, because He was depicted by simple uhristianswith­ out literary gifts."^

Thus one of his premises is the accuracy of the gospel records. On

this point he separates himself from the "sceptical school", of Whom

Wrede was the latest. As a student of Holtzmann, he could not fail

to be influenced by the Marcan hypothesis, which he defines asM

"the theory that Mark's gospel is the oldest, and that its plan underlies those of Matthew and Luke. That seemed to justify the cone Vision that the activities of Jesus can be understood from Mark's gospel only."^

This relegated Yatthew and Luke to a secondary position which achweitaer

could not accept, for, in the first ^lace, the Marcan hypothesis had

been the basis of a spate of unsatisfactory "liberal" lives of Jesus,

and in the second place, Schweitzer's own wschatological view depends,

aa we have just seen, on Matthew 10 and 11 to explain l ;ark. Yet he

does accept the Synoptic, and essentially the ."farcan, plan of the life

of Jesus as against the Johannine^, and finds his main difficulty in

the lack of connection between the events as recorded by 'lark. For

history, as Schweitzer understands it, is the record of events with

a view to establishing the causal relation between them.''4 Xet

"from these materials we can only get a Life of Jesus with yawning gans. How are these gaps to be filled? At the worst with phrases, at the best with historical imagination. There is really no other means of arriving at the order and inner connection of the facts of the life of Jesus than the making and testing of hypotheses."5

1. .uest, p. 6.

2. My Life and Thought, p, 17.

3. See Quest, pp. 6-7.

4. See above, p. 47.

*5. 'uest, p. 7«

70

Again the method must be experimental. Again a "key" is needed'.

It must explain not only the outward connection between events, but

also the inner connection, by explaining the problems of Jesus'

self^consciousness, and any development that may have taken rfLace

in it. 1 And with this is bound UD His secrecy concerning the I-ies-

siahship which was later ascribed to Him, and His use of the term

Son of J'an. Thus early in the Quest Schweitzer is foreshadowing

the solution which he has already discovered in the Sketch, the

eschatological interpretation of.the life of Jesus, which so neatly

and Completely solves these problems, to his satisfaction at least.

In the course of the above discussion, however,' he mentions in

passing still another difficulty:

"If the tradition -reserved by the Synoptists really includes all that happened during the time that Jesus was with His disciples, the attempt to discover the connection (Between the events of His life) must succeed sooner or later. It becomes more and more clear that this presuppo­ sition is indispensable to the investigation. If it is merely a fortuitous series of episodes that the evangelists have handed down tsb us, we may give up the attempt to ar­ rive at a critical reconstruction of the life of Jesus as hopeless."2

This is the most damaging admission of all, ror necessary as this

presumption may be, there is no way of establishing its truth, or

even its probability. On the contrary, It seems nost unlikely, for

he has admitted in the previous paragraph:

" .'.hile the Synoptics are only collections of anecdotes (in the best, historical sense of the word), the Gospel of John - as stands on record in its closing words - only pro­ fesses to give a selection of the events and discourses."^

1. uest, p. 7i

2. ibid., p. 7'

3. ibid., p. 7.

But to suppose that the Synoptists give us all the events of His

life is to make of John's Gospel a pure figment of the pious imagi­

nation of its author, for the larger part of the events recorded in

John find no place in the Synoptic account at all. Yet Schweitzer

feels himself constrained to make this supposition because of

"the complete irreconcilability of the historical data."-1-

Thereby he believes he establishes the Synoptics, and especially

Mark, as the useful basis of his research. And having disposed of

this difficulty, he allows himself to be carried away with the neat­

ness with which his solution disposes of certe.in problems of inter­

pretation, and makes of the life of Jesus a compact, logical system.

Indeed 9 he bids fair to carry away his reader as well. The serious

impression which his writings have made is a tribute to the force

with which he has been able to present his results, and the reali­

sation that eschatology did actually play a larger part in the

teachings of Jesus than his contemporaries were willing to admit,

Yet even on this very subject of eschatology he finds it neces­

sary, at the beginning of the Quest, to point out graVe difficulties.

In order to be completelyhistorical", he assumes that Jesus is only

human and subject to human motivation, so that

"His Dersonality is to some extent defined by the world of thought which it shares with its contemporaries."^

This is in itself an assumption that most scholars either overlooked

or disdained to consider, for they felt that Jesus would be the

master of His world, rather than subject to it. It is interesting

1. Quest, p. 6.

2. Quest, p. 8.

that Schweitzer, who claims to have restored Jesus' imperious au­

thority, should be the one to insist on His dependence on the

thought-world in which He lived. But even after stating this as­

sumption, he is no better off, for he can find "no valid answer"

to the question:

"What was the nature of the contemporary Jewish worid of thought?"1

Here again the fdft for discovering problems finds an opportunity

to exert itself. He mentions these:

"we do not know whether the expectation of the Messiah was generally current or whether it was the faith of a mere sect. ... If the eschatological hcne was generally current, was it the prophetic or the apocalyptic form of that hope? ... We know only the form of eschatology which meets us in the Gospels and in the Pauline epistles; that is to say, the form which it took in the Christian community in con­ sequence of the coming of Jesus. . . . u-ven supposing we could obtain more exact information regarding the popular "essianic expectations at the time of Jesus, we should still not know what form they assumed in the self-consciousness of One who knew Himself to be the Messiah but held that the time was not yet come for Him to reveal Himself as such. . . . For the form of the Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus we have to fall back on conjecture."^

As we have already seen, this is the typical Schweitzer method -

to state a problem with every conceivable difficulty, thus making

it appear hopelessly insoluble.

"Such is the character of the problem, and, as a conse­ quence, historical experiment must here take the place of historical research."3

Yet by his "historical experiment" he is quite confident that he

has solved it,

1. Quest, p. #.

2. ibid., pr^. 8-9.

jf, ibid., p. 9-

13-

It should be remarked here that all this uncertainty about

his premises, both sources and eschatology, which we have been con­

sidering in these last few pages, is brought out in the first, in­

troductory, chapter of the Quest. Schweitzer is here stating the

problem in general terms, not so much to explain how he faced it,

as to show how the many scholars whose works he is about to review

could arrive at such different conclusions about the life of Jesus.

He will try to bring order out of chaos by judging them according

to the contribution they make to its understanding and the solution

of its problems, by the time he comes to his own work, eighteen

chapters later, he apparently feels that these matters have been

adequately dealtrwith, for he has no hesitation about affirming

his own results as if they were proved. He seems to forget that

his is also an "historical experiment", based on doubtful postu­

lates, and solved by a clue arrived at by intuition.

This is not, however, to say that the eschatological inter­

pretation of the life of Jesus is entirely false. TO do so would

be to fall into one of the pit-falls of the "historical" German

scholars, who so frequently reckoned that they had disproved a

matter by casting doubt upon it, and had established a finding by

showing its possibility or necessity to their theory. Schweitzer

is one with them in this. For instance, his method of disposing

of the "modern-historical" life of Jesus is to take the four as­

sumptions he considers basic to it and to cast doubt ur)on them.

This is the subject of the first chapter of the Sketch. 1

1. The four assumptions are listed on pp. 63-64, then dealt with on the following pages, with a re'sunie" on pp. 81-82.

74

The first of these assumptions is that Jesus' life falls into

two periods, the first successful, when He preached to the multi­

tudes in Galilee, the second unsuccessful, when He fled before the

persecutions of the Pharisees and the Herodians, and finally came

to the conclusion that He must suffer death at their hands for the

sake of the Kingdom. Schweitzer deals with this by pointing out

instances of failure in the first period, and of success in the

second, thereby refuting the notion that the passion-idea was

prompted by failure. Yet it is noteworthy that when Schweitzer

tries to account for the passion-idea himself in chapter IX, he

does so on the ground of a different kind of supposed failure -

the failure of the Kingdom of God to appear at the time of the

harvest, when Jesus sent out the twelve to preach.

"Before the Kingdom could come the Affliction must arrive. But it* failed to arrive. It must be brought about in order that the Kingdom may thus be constrained to come. . . . But now God does not bring the Affliction to pass. And yet the atonement must be made. Then it occurred to Jesus that He as the coming Son of Man must accomplish the atonement in His own person."!

Schweitzer thus substitutes a failure of God to live up to Jesus'

expectations for the failure of Jesus to gain the support of the

authorities.

In dealing with the second assumption - that the gospel wri­

ters in recording the idea of the Passion were somehow influenced

by the Pauline doctrine of the atonement - Schweitzer falls back

on a verbal distinction. In Das Abendmahlsproblein. he had noted

that according to Mark and Matthew Jesus is reported to have spo­

ken of His blood shed for many, while in Luke and Paul both the

1. Sketch, pp. 234-235.

75

body is broken and the blood is shed for you. 1 Now in the Sketch

he uses this difference as grounds that Mark and Ilatthew are not

dependent on Paul, since their reading cannot be derived from his,

but his can from theirs.

The third assumption is the "ooint where Schweitzer finds him­

self most at variance with the "modern-historical" view, The lat­

ter suggested that

"the conception of the Kingdom of God as a self-fulfilling ethical society in which service is the highest law domi- hated the idea of the Passion." 2

Schweitzer sees this as derived from the Lucan account of Jesus'

remarks on service to the twelve when they had been quarreling

about their positions in the Kingdom at the Last Sapper.3 His

own eschatological view he finds in the "older Synoptists", Ma

and Matthew.5 He then traces this same difference of aspect

through other parallel passages, and substitutes the eschatologi­

cal for the tethical understanding of the Kingdom on the ground

that Mark and Matthew, being older, are more trustworthy than

Luke, whose purpose is "literary"." This charge of "literary" in

tention, as a means of disposing of inconvenient evidence, is a

favourite of the very "liberals" whose view Schweitzer here uses

it to disprove. The idea seems to be that a writer who uses care

1. See Das Abendmahlsproblem, p. 51^ ton and bottom.

2. Sketch, p. 63^

J. Luke 22.24-27.

4. Mark 10.41-45,

5. Matthew 20.25-23.

6. The details can be found in the Sketch, pp.73-30,

in his treatment of his sources is more likely to embellish his

report for literary effect, add therefore less likely $o be his­

torically reliable, than those who write more spontaneously. But

even granting the lack in first-century writers of what we con­

sider a critical historical sense, and their predilection for

the marvelous, this argument would seem to be greatly overworked.

The very fact that a man exercised care in his rerorting should

enhance, rather than diminish, the value of his evidence.

The fourth assumption which Schweitzer takes pains to refute

is closely related to the third. Jesus cannot, he insists, have

taught His disciples to understand the Kingdom ethically, because

4l He imparted to them the thought of the Passion, not in the form of an ethical reflection, but as a secret, without fur­ ther explanation."-1

This statement is to be proved in the following chapters of the

book.

In each of these cases, Schweitzer's method is clearly appar­

ent : first he states his disagreement with the "modern-historical"

view, then lays claim to Ms own. But in ea£h case, the criticism

of the former is bound up with the assumption of the latter. To

one who is not predisposed to the eschatological view, Schweitzer's

assumptions are no stronger than those he is attacking. Only the

forcefulness of his writing, and the logical way in which he builds

on his assumptions, make his view seem the stronger.

Similarly, in the Quest, as he deals with first one and then

another of those who preceded him, his own interpretation keeps

colouring his judgment. This is quite unintentional, for he tries

1. Sketch, p. 81.

to be objective, and he succeeds to a degree. Yet even in these

judgments, he feels the need of a "key":

"There Is really no common standard by which to judge the works with which we have to do. . . . But once one has ac­ customed oneself to look for certain definite landmarks amid this apparent welter of confusion one begins at last to discover in vague outline the course followed, and the progress made, by the critical study of the life of Jesus." 1

He summarizes the main problem in this way:

"While these discussions of the preliminary literary questions were in progress, the main historical problem of the life of Jesus was rising slowly into view. The

question began to be mooted: what was the significance of eschatology for the mind of Jesus?"

Thus for him the really important writers are not those whose "Lives"

are longest or most orderly or most imposing, but those who raise

the most pertinent problems, whether they succeed in solving them

or not. Thus D. F. Strauss and Bruno Bauer are important as scep­

tics, foreshadowing Wrede, and Reimarus and Johannes Weiss as pro­

ponents of the eschat ©logical view, foreshadowing Schweitzer. The

only others to whom a whole chapter of the Quest is devoted are

Paulus, the rationalist, and Renan, the French novelist. In the

end it turns out that the whole uest is setting the stage for

wrede and Schweitzer, and their combined attack upon the "liberal"

view, followed by Schweitzer's criticism of wrede, which leaves

his own interpretation alone in the field.

This climax comes in the jaelcb to last chapter of the wuest,

where we find again the characteristic Schweitzerian historical

method, with the slight variation that here two alternative "keys",

1. Quest, pp. 9-10,

2. ibid., p. 10.

7ft

scepticism and eschatology, are offered, although in the end only

the latter is found to solve all the problems. The great advan­

tage of both these "keys", in Schweitzer's mind, is that they are

ppplied in a "thoroughgoing" manner, pressing the original suppo­

sitions to their logical conclusions. This makes them more valid

than the "liberal" view, which he accuses of temporizing. Both

face up to the historical problems involved in a historical under­

standing of the life of Jesus, and offer solutions. But his

final treatment of mrede's and his own views in the points in

which they differ is the usual one - he points out all the problems

left unsolved by VVrede's sceptical theory, thereby disposing of

it by casting doubt upon it, while he sees only the problems

solved by the eschatological interpretation, thereby establishing

it as preferable, and so the only true one.

A study of these two treatments will demonstrate how he does

this. In criticising id/rede he passes judgments which are not sub­

stantiated. Kor instance, he finds fault with wrede's suggestion

that the early ohristian community formed the Messianic tradition

by such statements as this:

"A creative tradition would have carried out the theory of the Messianic secret in the life of Jesus much more boldly and logically, that is to say, at once more arbitrarily and more consistently."^

But this presupposes that the early bhristians had the same love

of consistency and Konsequenz as Schweitzer himself. He then

points out that Wrede finds two strains of tradition, in order to

explain certain cases in which Jesus appears openly as Messiah,

1. Quest, p. 339.

79

in contrast to his "concealment" theory?

"And these three facts are precisely the most important of all: Peter's confession, the untry into Jerusalem, and the High Priest's knowledge of Jesus' Messiahshipl In each case Wrede finds himself obliged to refer these to tradition in­ stead of to the literary conception of Mark."*

But to vfhom are these facts the "most important of all"? To Schweit­

zer, because they fit his theory. It is just as reasonable for Wrede

to feel that these are unimportant exceptions, because they do not

fit his theory. Or again:

"The positive difficulty which confronts the sceptical the­ ory is to explain how the Messianic beliefs of the first generation arose, if - T esus, throughout His life, was for all, even for the disciples, merely a 'teacher', and gave even his intimates no hint of the dignity which He claimed for Himself," 2

But who says Jesus claimed this for Himself? Again it is Schweitzer.

wrede makes the whole claim an invention of Mark and the early ohurch,

On the other hand, in defending his own views, Schweitzer as-

setts that?

"Eschatology is simply 'gogaiatic history' - history as moulded by theological beliefs - which breaks in unon the natural course of history and abrogates it. Is it not even a priori the only conceivable view that the conduct of one who looked forward to His Messianic 'Parousia' in the near future should be determined, not by the natural course of events, but by that expectation?"^

Certainly not a priori, for this is just what Schweitzer is trying

to prove - that Jesus was subject to the escnatological beliefs of

His time. To grant it a priori is to beg the question. A page

later he is even bolder:

1. Quest, p. 340,

2. ibid., p. 343.

3. ibid., p. 349-

"Until they (those who assert a longer period of duration for the ministry of Jesus) have succeeded in Droving it, we may assume something like the following course of events. nl

Here it is in black and white! Schweitzer assumes the whole thing'.

Later, to be sure, he tries to substantiate many features of it, and

show how reasonable it is, but his whole interpretation is based on

an assumption. It is a "historical experiment", whose possibility

he ably demonstrates, but not its truth, for that is not capable

of demonstration.

But let it be repeated: to show the fallacy of Schweitzer 1 s

method is not to prove the falsity of his conclusions, any nore

than Schweitzer himself can prove their truth. The fact is, as he

has so ably pointed out in the opening chapter of the Quest, we do

not have the materials for a complete and cogent life of Jesus.

What we do have is a series of incidents from His life, many of

them isolated, from which we can learn a good deal about Him. And

one of the things we learn is that eschatology colours the whole

narrative, whether Jesus Himself believed in it, or whether it

crept in because of the beliefs of His disciples. There is no harm

in filling in the gaps with inspired, imagination, provided we keep

in mind that it is conjecture, and not proved truth. It can some­

times be raised to the level of probability, but never of histori­

cal certainty. In this sense, the "historical Jesus" is no longer

possible to us. It is the fault of the nineteenth-century ration­

alism that so many really learned men should believe for so long

that they could ultimately supply the missing facts out of their

1. Quest, p, 350.

heads by their own inductive and deductive reasoning.

3. More recent developments.

Since Schweitzer's Sketch and Quest appeared, a good deal has

been written in the field of flew Testament criticism. It is not

the province of this thesis to review all of this literature, al­

though indeed such a prolific student as Schweitzer might have done

so, had not other interests, notably his missionary work, and his

study of the philosophy of civilisation, taken all of his time.

But there are several movements which have a direct bearing on his

eschatological interpretation of the life of Jesus, and. with these

we must deal.

a. comparative religion.

The first of these is the attempt, in the name of comparative

religion, to show that Jesus never really existed as a historical

personality. Schweitzer had called Wrede's scepticism concerning

the trustworthiness of Mark "thoroughgoing 1'. Yet for all nisi

scepticism, Wrede never suggested that the existence of Jesus was

a fiction of Mark or of the primitive uhristian community. It re­

mained for other, even more "thoroughgoing" sceptics to do that.

Fortunately, most of the important works in this movement

had appeared before Schweitzer revised his Quest, and the second

edition of the (jeschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, in German,

includes two chapters on the subject. In chapter XXII, Schweitzer

traces the new scepticism from its origins in the writings of Du-

puis and Volney, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the

nineteenth centuries, down through the works of J. M. Robertson,

Vf. B. Smith, Arthur Drews, and others, which appeared in the firsts

decade of the twentieth century. These latter he reviews in his

usual thorough way, clearly stating the case of each one. Then in

chapter XXIII, he deals with the whole movement, again in charac­

teristic fashion, by raising four questions which he considers

fundamental to it, and then dealing with each one in turn.

with his keen analytical mind, Schweitzer divides the move­

ment into its two main branches:

"Schon der oberflachlichen Betrachtung wird ersicht- lich, dass die Bestreiter der Geschiehtlichkeit Jesu nur in der Verneinung einig sind, im librigem aber, was die Be- grtindung der Theorie und die Erklftrung des Aufkoraraens des Ulaubens an einen geschiehtlichen Jesus betrifft, in mannig- facher rtei.se voneinander abweichen. uer hauptsachlichste Unterschied besteht darin, dass nach den einen die in den ttiaangelien gezeichnete G-estalt die Uedanken, Prinzipien, und Erlebnisse der das uhristentum hervorbringenden sozi- alen und religiosen Bewegung darstellt, wahrend es sich nach den andern urn die in einer bestimraten phase der Ent- wicklung der Vythologie mit Notwendigkeit eintretende Ver- geschichtlichung einer zentralen Vorstellung handelt."!

Schweitzer calls these the "symbolische" and the "mythische" res­

pectively. The distinction between them affords the "key" to

their understanding:

"Da sie logisch und sachlich begrtindet ist und die Richt- ung der beiden sich kreuzenden wege angibt, liefert sie den Schltissel zum eigentlichen Vi/esen verschiedenen Losungs- versuche und erlaubt die vorgenommenen Operationen in ihrer Mannigfaltigkeit zu verstehen und auf eine klare .formel bringen."^

The mythical view is the older, going back to Dupuis and Vol-

ney. It was also the first to reaprear at the turn of the century,»

in the works of J. M. Robertson. According to him, the whole basis

of Christianity is myth, even the canonical Scriptures. He derives

1. Quest, Ger.ed., p. 447. 2. ibid., p. 447

his uhrist from the widest and weirdest assortment of ancient myths,

from''the early Semites and the pre-uhristian Mexicans" to "the

Druids about the beginning of the uhristian era."1 His fundamental

assumption seems to be that if any gospel incident can be derived,

even by the most far-fetched procedure, from any ancient religious

source other than the New Testament, then the other source must be\

its origin; and when no 6uch source is discoverable, then its exist-

£ence must be assumed. Of one such piece of imaginary derivation -

that the birth of Jesus was laid in Bethlehem because He is related

to Adonis, and Jerome reports the existence of a shrine to Adonis

there - Schweitzer points out that Jerome specifically introduces

this information with the words "ab Hadriani temparribus", but adds,

rather acidly,

"aber das darf keine Rolle spielen, wo die Interesse der Jdythologie in Frage kommen."^

Peter Jensen, on the other hand, tried to derive the whole of

the Bible, the Old Testament as well as the Mew, from one ancient

Babylonian myth about the heroes (lilgamesch and j&ngidu. The at­

tempt is possible only because the source is badly mutilated, so

that much of it must be reconstructed. Jiven so, the result is as

far-fetched and forced as Robertson's.

Niemowski and i'Tihrmann, independently, seek to derive the

story of Jesus from astral mythology, jruhrmann especially shows

a wide range of familiarity with his sources, but a^ain it is

necessary to assume a growth and application of myth which cannot

1. J. M. Robertson, A Short History of Christianity, p. 29.

2. Quest, Ger. ed., p. 459, footnote.

be demonstrated.

Chief champion of the symbolic view is W. B. Smith. He assumes

the existence of a "pre-Christian Jesus", in the sense that out of

the pre-Christian world a ohristian gnostic cult arose, with symbolic

truth expressed in stories which, were later taken literally, and thus

came to be considered as historical incidents in the life of a histor­

ical personality. Smith does not work out his theory in detail **

he claims as his excuse lack of time - but he gives many suggestions

to indicate its direction, though not enough to prove or disprove it,

Arthur Drews, in his Christmsmythe f advances theories which seem

f>o fall into both categories. Schweitzer comments:

"Dass der Stoff lebendig gruppiert ist und ein gewisser grosser Zug durch das Buch geht, ratlssen auch diejenigen aner- kenned, die im Interesse der Wissenschaft eine grtindlichere prinzipielle Behandlung der rrage gewtinscht hatten und seinen flotten Erkundungritt zuletzt doch nicht als eine entscheid- ende strategische uperation anerkennen kftnnen."-'-

But Drews himself hardly seems to know where he stands. He gives

up, in subsequent books, first the existence of Jesus, then the gen­

uineness of all the Pauline letters, and with them the idea that

Paul is responsible for making of Jesus an historical figure. This,

to Schweitzer, Is a sign of

t( die merkwttrdige Unselbstandigkeit und zugleich Prinzipien- losigkeit iron Drews."2

How, then, did Jesus come to be regarded as historiaal? Drews is 3

most vague about this, so that Schweitzer sums up:

"Gerade diejenigen, die nicht darauf auggehen, mit Drews um Kleinigkeiten zu lechnen, sondern mit ihm Probleme erfassen

1» Quest/, Ger. ed., p. 491.

2. ibid., p. 493.

und klaren mbchten, haben Mtthe, die Enttauschung die ihnen der zweite xeil der ohristusmythe bereitet hat, zu unter- drucken und dtirfen den Wunsch aussprechen, dass die ftardi- nalfrage endlieh in Angriff genoramen werde."1

Whittaker, Bolland, and Lublinski are also briefly mentioned.

Schweitzer does not believe any proper treatment of the whole

subject had appeared before 1912, when he revised the j^iest. The

treatment on both sides had been too popular rather than scienti­

fic:

"Die Bestreiter der ueschichtlichkeit des iMazareners . , . traten gleich zu Anfang herausfordernd auf, ohne von irgend einer Seite gereizt worden zu sein, und taten als ob sie allein deij Mat hatten, die Stimme fir die Wahrheit zu er- heben, wahrend 'die Theologen 1 aus Beschrankbheit oder Aengstlichkeit noch an der n^cistenz Jesu festhielten und die natttrlichen Konsequenzen der neuesten rorschungen nicht zu ziehen wagten,"^

Therefore he undertakes to accomplish the task, and proceeds to ana­

lyze the problem:

"In seiner Komplexitat besteht das Problem aus vier tiauptfragen: einer religionsphilosophischen, einer religi- onsgeschichtlichen, einer dogmengeschichtlichen, und einer literarhistorischen."3

Each of these is then studied in detail.

. His very statement of the first reveals a sDecial interest in

the question:

"iiVelche Stellung nimrat, rein theoretisch betrachtet, die in den Evangelien geschilderte rersOnlichkeit Jesu in der christlichen oder einer mehr oder weniger christlich ge- arteten Religion ein? Inwiefern ist sie deren rundament oder Element? Welche rolgen mttsste ihr eventueller ver- lust nach sich ziehen, sei es dass die moderne ueligiOsi- tat sie als unbefriedigend und freifidartig empfindet, sei es dass ihre Kxistenz uberhaupt zweifelhaft

1. Quest, p. 496-

2. ibid., p. 500. 4. ibid., p. 503.

3. ibid., p. 503.

The possibility that the historical Jesus might prove irrelevant

to present religious needs can only refer to his own eschatologi-

cai interpretation of the life of Jesus, which, as he had real­

ized in the first edition of the Quest, made

"the historical Jesus . . . to our time a stranger and an enigma," *

He is therefore as much interested in finding a philosophical

basis for uhristianity on account of his own reinterpretation of

its founder as on account of the attacks made upon Him by tfobert-

son, Smith a urews, and their followers. This becomes still

clearer when he writes:

"Die religionsphilosoT)hische rrage hat es also mit den beiden extremen Fallen zu tun, dass Jesus fur die moderne tieli giB sit at nicht existieren kttnnte, entweder weil er nicnt, feclebt hat oder aber, weil er sich als zu histo- risch erweisst.''^

By this twist, he allies himself with the deniers of Jesus 1 his­

toricity against "modern theology" in rnuch the same way that he

had earlier allied himself with Wrede's scepticism, not because

he aggres with them, but in order that "theology" may come to it­

self and mend its ways.

"ScEliesslich ist es mit den geistigen Bewegungen wie mit den Menschen: sie mtissen durch Demutigungen hin- durch, urn zu wachsen und zu reifen. Das einzige, worauf es ankommt, ist, dass die moderne Theologie zur Selbst- erkenntnis komme, ihr unnaturliches Wesen allege, und wirklick wieder 'freisinnig' werde, um zur Jfcrftillung der grossen Mission, zu der sie berufen ist, tuchtig zu sein."3 "Und dennoch muss zuletzt alles gut und segensvoll aus- gehen, wenn die moderne iheologie auf ihre restigung und

1. ^ruesb, Eng. ed., p. 397.

2. Quest, Ger. ed., p. 517.

3. Quest, Ger. ed., p. 514.

Verinnerliching bedacht ist und sich zu schlichter und tiefer Wahrhaftigkeit erzieht.« 1

But so far, none of the contenders has done this adequately. It was

this failure, with the horrible resulting decadence of ci-Rilisation,

which led Schweitzer out of the field of New Testament research,

and into that of the Philosophy of Civilisation which has become,

all his biographers agree, his most important written contribution

to mankind.

The second question he defines thus:

"Religionsgeschichtlich 1st zu erwagen, ob es an der Wende der Zeitrechnung eine orientalisch-griechisch-judisbhe, synkretistische Bewegung gegeben haben kann, die die Idee eines sterbenden und auferstehenden Erlttser^gottes dachte und dann dazu fortschritt, ihm eine historische Existenz beizulegen, wie sie in den Evangelien geschildert ist."

Ifa. dealing with it, he shows how unsatisfactory are the imaginary

reconstructions of those who postulate a pre-Christian gnosticism.

He convicts them of unscientific confusion in their use of terms,

their chronology of religious history, and their description of the

relationship, causal and derivative, of Christianity as a historical

movement to the other religions of ancient times.

This leads to the third question:

"Das dogmengeschichtliche Problem hat es zunachst mit dem Verhaltnis des wirklichen Christentums zum wirklichen U-nostizismus zu tun. "3

The differences he points out between the two far exceed the like­

nesses adduced to form the basis of the mythological and symbolical

theories. 80 he concludes that

"Der vorchristliche Gnostizismus ist ein ttlckischer

1. Cuest, Ger.ed., p. 515<

2. ibid., p. 503.

3. ibid., p. 541.

88

Wucherer. Denen, die ihn urn Material zur Erklarung der Ent- stehung des Urchristentums angehen, streckt er bereitwilligst alles Gewttnschte vor. Aber sobald sie sich rait der kontrol- lierbaren Geschichte einlassed, fordert er alsbald alles mit Zinsen und Zinseszinsen zurttck, da seine Wechsel vom histo- rischen Christentum und vom wirklichen Gnostizismus nicht honoriert werden."

As to the fourth:

"Die li;bera£historische Frage fordert den sachlichen Entscheid, ob die Berichte der Evangelien sich als Ueber- lieferungen von demnWirken einer geschichtlichen spat- jtldischen Pers&nlichkeit erklaren lassen oder ob Kunst- produkte - zu Geschichte erstarrte Mythen oder symbolische Erzahlungen - anzunehnien sind."^

He points out that the more conventional theologians are having their

troubles with the texts, and how inconclusive are most of their ef­

forts to determine which texts are genuine and which are not. but

then he goes on to point out that the suppositions of their opponents

make them even harder to explain:

"Solange Smith, Robert son, Drews und ihre Anhanger sich mit der modernen Theologie auseinandersetzen, ist ihre Posi­ tion also insofern nicht ungttnstig, als sie auf offenbare Fehler hinweisen und sich als die konsequenten Geister aus- geben konnen. Ganz anders gestaltet sich die Lage aber, sobald sie ihre eigene Ansicht aus den Texten begrttnden sollen. Hier zeigt sich alsbald, dass sie die Fehler, die sie ihren Gegner vorwerfen, selber in hervorragendem Masse besitzen und Behauptungen aufstellen, dis sich noch weniger rechtfertigen lassen als diejenigen, die sie widerlegt

So Schweitzer's final conclusion with regard to the whole movement

is the terse judgment:

"Es ist also zu schliessen, dass <iie Annahme, Jesus habe existiert, ttberaus wkhrscheinlich, ihr uegenteil aber ttheraus unwahrscheinlich ist . "4

And there, in the realm of probability, he leaves the matter, just

as he was obliged to leave the eschatological Jesus.

1. Quest, Ger.ed., pp. 542-543. 3. ibid. t p. 557.

2. ibid., p. 504* 4. ibid., p. 564.

b. Form-criticism*

A second development which has changed the theological outlook

with tegard to the historical approach to the life and teachings of

Jesus is that known as rorm^riticisra. It is inonical to note that

German theology, faced by Wrede and Schweitzer with the necessity

of taking account of the eschatological element in the Liospels} has

followed Wrede rather than Schweitzer.

The difference between the two was that Wrede attributed the

eschatological passages in Mark's gospel to its author and to the

primitive Christian community from which he got his material, while

Schweitzer attributed it to Jesus Himself. Theologians, faced with

this alternative, chose the only way out which would seem to pre­

serve Jesus' integrity. They preferred to believe that the escha-

tology, which was never literally fulfilled, was caused by the

evangelist or the primitive community reading its own eschato­

logical hopes into the record, or into the traditions on which it

was based. This led to a whole new field of investigation: to

study the tradition in the process of formation and transmission

before it reached the stage of being compiled into our ^resent

gospels.

One phase of the study was "Source-Criticism", which seeks to

determine the nature and extent of the written sources used by the

Synoptists. It had really begun long before Schweitzer, with the

serious study of the Synoptic problem. By his day the "Two-Source"

theory was already pretty well established:

"Dass die Zweiquellentheorie sich in allgemein durchgesetzt

1. See Quest, Eng.ed., p. 329.

90

hat, darf wohl als anerkannt

This "Two-Source" theory was that Vark had written a narrative life

of Jesus, while His teachings had been gathered into a separate

source, usually known as Q, which had been used by Matthew and Luke

as well. Schweitzer really bases his interpretation upon this the­

ory, rather than the Marcan hypothesis, since he introduces speeches

from Matthew into the Marcan account. He feels quite justified in

this, for after dealing with Harnack's Sprttche und Reden Jesu, he

concludes:

"Sicher ist so viel, dass der Verlauf der ttffentlichen Wirksamkeit des Herrn weder aus Markus, .ioch aus der Ueber- lieferung der Spruehsammlung, sondern nur aus beiden zuaam- men zu lihersehen und zu rekonstruieren ist."^

Various attempts have been made to improve upon this "Two-Source"

theory. One, that by von Soden and others to find behind ?fark an

"Ur-Markus", Schweitzer had felt called upon to refute in the first

edition of the Questv By the time of the second edition, however,

he felt able to discount it:

"Auf die Gewinnung einer 'Ur-Harkus' wird gewtthnlich ver- zichtet."^

In this verdict he was mistaken. Bussmann, in his more recent re­

searches, has really revived the Ur-Markus theory in that he postu­

lates a basic narrative document U, used by all three Synoptists,

supplemented by additional material B, used by Matthew and Mark

but unknown to Luke, who supplemented G from sources of his own.5

1. Quest, Ger.ed., p. 605. 3. Quest, Eng.ed., p. 329.

2* ibid., p. 607, 4. uest, Ger.ed., p. 603.

5. See Bussmann, Synoptische Studien, Bd.I-III.

91

R, Otto's theory of a "Staramschrift" is very similar. 1 Streeter,

on the other hand, tries to distinguish between Q, the common dis­

course source of Matthew and Luke, and separate sources M and L,

containing the matter peculiar to each, and to establish a "Proto-

Luke" behind Luke's gospel as we have it. 2 Jiven though these at­

tempts do not all agree, the fact that they are so numerous is an

indication that Schweitzer's theory of the origin of the gospel

records is much too simple, and that to depend as he does on the

order of events in Mark is decidedly perilous.

The more recent phase of the general study of the tradition,

however, is the attempt to get behind written sources of every

kind, and determine the origin and form of each separate section

of the oral tradition from which the written sources, and later

the gospels, were compiled. This is "Form-Geschichte", or "Form-

Criticism". Its purpose is clearly stated by Dibelius, one of the

founders of the movement, in these words of the author's preface

to the English edition o'f his basic work on the subject:

"The method of Formgeschichte has a two-fold objective. In the first place, by reconstruction and analysis, it seeks to explain the origin of the tradition about Jesus, and thus to penetrate into a period previous to that in which the Gospels and their written sources were recorded. But it has a further purpose. It seeks to make clear the intention and real interest of the earliest tradition. ....

"The method of Formgeschichte seeks to help in answer­ ing the historical questions as to the nature and trust­ worthiness of our knowledge of Jesus, and also in solving a theological problem properly so-called. It shows in what way the earliest testimony about Jesus was interwoven with the earliest testimony about the salvation which had

1. R. Otto, The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, pp. 82ff. Otto's treatment, however, is not very conclusive. He has a ten­ dency to include in St. what fits his theory, and omit what does not

2. See Streeter, The Four Gospels*

appeared in Jesus Christ."1

The principal assumption behind this method is that the handing

down of the tradition about Jesus was subject to certain laws, which

produced different forms of source materials for the gospels. The

method is to study each section of the gosrcels with a view to deter­

mining toiwhich form it belongs, and then studying the examples of

each form to determine what laws govern its transmission. These

laws are then applied to the individual sections in the group to de­

termine how they have been altered in the process of being handed

down, in order to judge, if possible, the historical trustworthiness

of the events recorded and the sayings attributed to Jesus.

Dibelius first tried to reconstruct the needs arising in the

primitive church which contributed to the preservation of such ma­

terials as are found in the gospels, and found the occasion of many

of them in the sermons preached to convert the Gentiles and in the

instruction classes for catechumens. His reason for suggesting the

Gentile church is that all the materials have come down to us in

Greek, although Aramaic was the original language of Jesus and His

disciples.' He analysed the different forms, and studied each one

in turn: Paradigmen, or short illustrative stories for use in ser­

mons; Novellen, or miracle-stories; Legenden, that is, stories about

sacred persons; the Passion story, which is the longest and most

primitive connected narrative in the whole tradition; Chriae and

Paraneses, or sayings of Jesus used to give instruction; and the

element of >fyth, which is very limited in the Synoptic Gospels, but

dominant in the Gospel of John. His study leads him to attribute

1. From Tradition to Gospel, pp.vrvi.

relatively more historical value to the Paradigms and Sayings, less

to the Tales and Legends, and least of all to the few Myths. He

concludes:

"General observations of this character are better able to show how conservative the tradition of Jesus really is than considerations of detail applied to passages of the New Testament."!and "The weightiest part of the tradition had been developed at a time while eyewitnesses still lived, and when the events were only about a generation old. It is not to be wondered at that this part of the tradition remains relatively unal­ tered." 2

But this result is only relative. Henceforth there can be no real

certainty of the wording of a text. Each text must be studied by

itself, according to its form, and judged accordingly.

Dibelius did not undertake this task in From Tradition to Gos­

pel. He did publish, later, a more or less popular treatment, The

Message of Jesus. In this, surprisingly, the classifications are

given slightly different names: Early Christian Preaching (examples

of primitive sermons), The Old Stories (some of the Paradigms and

the Passion Story), Parables (formerly included in the Sayings),

Sayings (Savings and groups of Sayings), The Great Miracle Tales

(mostly Novellen), and Legends. Many typical passages are printed

within wach of these groups^ in a fresh translation, in the first

half of the book. The second half offers an Explanation, which gives,

in a shortened form and less technical language, the application of

l^orm Criticism to the chosen Passages. The conclusions, however,

remain about the same as in the longer, more technical, work.

The more intensive examination of individual texts was under­

taken and carried out by Bultmann. His Geschichte der synoptischen

1. From Tradition to Gospel, p. 293. 2. ibid. p. 295.

Tradition and his Erforschung der synoptischen avangelien were at­

tempts to work out a similar method, quite independent of uibelius.

His categories therefore have different names, and the distinctions

between them are different. Yefe his Apo;bhegmata correspond in gen­

eral to Uibelius' Paradigms, though he subdivides them into Streit-

gesprache, Schulgesprache, and biographischen Apojbhegmata; his

Wundergeschichten match Uibelius' Novellen; and his sayings, divided

into five subheads; Logia, Prophetic words, Law-words and Rules,

Sayings in the first Person, and Parables, correspond roughly with

Dibelius' Paranesen; his Legenden include all the rest, including

the Myths, for he does not try to reserve historical judgment on

any of them. In fact, his criticism is so sceptical generally that

Vincent Taylor writes of him:

"It woul^^oe unfair to describe the work as a study in the cult of the conceivable. But I believe that no small part of his 'scepticism' is the painful anxiety of the trained investigator in bo way to fail in doing full justice to the formative activity of any community which appeals, and must appeal, to the words of a revered Teacher. The real charge against him is that he is kinder to the possibilities than to the probabilities of things."1

The above discussion only scratches the surface of the rorm

critical movement. But it will suffice for this thesis, into which

it is introduced only to show what bearing rormgeschichte has on

Schweitzer's eschatological interpretation of the life of Jesus.

Among its many consequences for gospel research are two which if

true seriously challenge Schweitzer's view.

The first is that it insists on the growth of the gospels as

collections of individual sections of traditional material, thus

1. The Formation of the uospel Tradition, p. 15.

95

destroying any possibility of reconstructing the life of Jesus from

them as if we had in^any sense a connected record of His life. This,

it will be remembered, was one of the postulates which Schweitzer

had insisted was necessary to his research:

"If the tradition preserved by the Synoptists really in­ cludes all that happened during the time that Jesus was with His disciples, the attempt to discover the connection must succeed sooner or later, it becomes more and more clear that this presupposition is indispensable to the investigation. If it is merely a fortuitous series of episodes that the evan­ gelists have handed down to us, we may give up the attempt to arrive at a critical reconstruction of the life of Jesus as hopeless."I

Moreover, he had himself used the fact that the gospels are con­

structed from disconnected sections as an argument against the ''lib­

eral" view:

"Thoroughgoing scepticism and thoroughgoing eschatology, between them, are compelling theology to read the Marcan text again with simplicity of mind. The simplicity consists in dispensing with the connecting links which it has been accus­ tomed to discover between the sections of the narrative (peri- copes), in looking at each one separately, and recognizing that it is difficult to pass from one to the other.

"The material with which it has hitherto been usual to solder the sections together into a life of Jesus will not stand the temperature test. Exposed to the cold air of criti­ cal scepticism it cracks; when the furnace of eschatology is heated to a certain point the solderings melt. In both cases the sections fall apart.

"Formerly it was possible to book through-tickets at the supplementary-psychological-knowledge office which enabled those travelling in the interests of Life-of-Jesus construction to use express trains, thus avoiding the inconvenience of having to stop at every little station, change, and run the risk of missing their connection. This ticket office is now closed. There is a station at the end of each section of the narrative, and the connections are not guaranteed."^

Of course, when it came to his own reconstruction, Schweitzer claimed

to have found a new principle of connection in the eschatology. But

1. Quest, p, 7. See above, p, 70.

2. Quest, pp.331-332.

if Form Criticism is right in its basic assumption that the gospels

were formed from independent and originally isolated elements of

tradition, of whatever character, then the through tickets sold at

the eschatology ticket-office are just as spurious as the others^

because there are no through trains on which they might be honoured.

The best we can do is to reconstruct the life of Jesus as it was

understood by a given Evangelist, reflecting perhaps the beliefs of

a given time and place in the early church. Schweitzer stands con­

demned by his own prolegomenon:

"If it is merely a fortuitous series of episodes that the Evangelists have handed down to us, we may give up the at­ tempt to arrive at a critical reconstruction of the life of Jesus as hopeless."^

A second consequence of Form Criticism for Schweitzer's view

is its undertanding of the trustworthiness of individual passages.

Different critics majr take different positions as to which passages

should be considered genuine. Bultmann is the more sceptical, but

even Dibelius points out that the historicity is all relative. In­

dividual deeds and sayings may be genuine, but even in these we

cannot depend on the wording in which we have them, since it was

susceptible of being coloured by the use to which they were put in

the churches, to which they owe their preservation. Yet the proud­

est claim of Schweitzer is that his interpretation does full justice

to the texts. That claim is justified to the extent that he takes

them more conscientiously at their face value than his contempo­

raries, out Form Criticism has shown the danger of taking texts

at their face value, without careful investigation of the process

1. Quest, p. 7.

97

by which each one was transmitted. Thus rorm Criticism casts doubt

upon Schweitzer 1 s eschatological view as effectively as he had cast

doubt upon the "liberal" view,

It is interesting to note here what Schweitzer had to say of

B. F. Strauss, who was, in a way, a forerunner of the rorm Critics,

in that he discovered mythical elements in many of the gospel narra­

tives, and, indeed, seems to have sought them, even where they did

not exist. Schweitzer's comment is this:

"For one thing, he overestimates the importance of the Old Testament motives in reference to the creative activity of the legend. He does not see that while in many cases he has shown clearly enough the source of the form of the nar­ rative in question, this does not suffice to explain its origin. Doubtless, there is mythical material in the story of the feeding of the multitude. But the existence of the story is not explained by referring to the manna in the des­ ert, or the miraculous feeding of a multitude by Elisha. The story in the Gospel has far too much individuality for that, and stands, moreover, in much too closely articulated an historical connection. It must have as its basis some historical fact. It is not a myth, though there is myth in it. Similarly with the account of the transfiguration. The substratum of historical fact in the life of Jesus is much more extensive than Strauss is prepared to admit."!

JSxcept for the Old Testament references, these same sentences might

well be the reaction of a conservative exegete to the researches of

Bultmann, But they are not sufficient to refute Form Criticism. In

the first place, Form Criticism has a well worked-out theory of the

origins as well as of the forms of the gospel date in the tradition

of the early church. And in the second place, to establish a sub­

stratum of historical fact, which the Form Critics concede, is not

to establish the verbal accuracy of the record of that fact, or the

relation of that fact to the other facts also embedded in the gospels.

Quest, p. #4- ihe italics are his.

On the other hand, in dealing with wrede, Schweitzer makes a

number of criticisms which might be extended to rorm criticism as

well. The problem at issme here is how Jesus could have come to

be considered Messiah by the primitive community if He had not

Himself claimed to be.

"The positive difficulty which confronts the sceptical theory is to explain how the Messianic beliefs of the first generation arose, if Jesus, throughout His life, was for all, even for the disciples, merely a 'teacher 1 , and gave even His intimates no hint of the dignity which He claimed for Himself. It is difficult to eliminate the Messiahship from the 'lige of Jesus', especially from the narrative of the passion; it is more difficult still, as Keim saw long ago, to bring it back again after its elimination from the 'Life' into the theology of the primitive Church."1

Wrede traced it back to the "resurrection experiences". "But",

demands Schweitzer,

"how did the appearance of the risen Jesus suddenly become for them a proof of His Messiahship and the basis of their eschatology?"2

He claims they must have been led to expect it by the historical

Jesus.

"Here Wrede himself, though without admitting it, postulates some Messianic hints on the part of Jesus, since he con­ ceives the judgment of the disciples upon the resurrection to have been not analytical, but synthetic, inasmuch as they add something to it, and that, indeed, the main thing, which was not implied in the conception of the event as such."3

He then goes on to point out other inconsistencies in Wrede, and

concludes:

"He is bound to refer everything inexplicable to the prin­ ciple of the concealment of the Messiahship."^

1. Quest, p. 343. 4. Quest., p. 347-

2. ibid., p, 343.

3. ibid., p. 344.

Schweitzer's disposal of Wrede is very skilful indeed. And in

it he puts his finger also on the Form-critical attitude in germ.

For ^or.vi Criticism, does not show where the primitive community got

its idea that Jesus was ^essiah, or indeed, where many of its ideas

came from if not from Him to whom they are attributed. The nearest

answer to the present question is found in Dibelius' discussion of

the motives behind the collation of the passion StoryJ n

"viz., to describe that meaning of the events which was founded on the Easter faith.» 1

p ut this is just what Schweitzer had criticised in »«rede. un the

other haddj it should be pointed out that uibelius nowhere denies

the eschatology, as vvrede had done in Postulating that Jesus was

known to nis disciples only as a "teacher". And here we observe a

great difference between rorm Criticism :md the historical criticism

to which Schweitzer belonged - rorm uriticisra Is interested in,

tracing bsch the tradition, in a literary way,* and its interest in

historicity is only secondary. Enough for Form criticism that the

tradition s^oVe of je^ir.; in eschatological terms as the Messiah, and.

also collected Mis sayings as of value for teaching, in fact, at

one point$ it sounds as if uibelius 9scribed the idea o<? desus as

teacher to Mark:

"The introductory remarks depicting t^e circumstances (of the parabolic discourse in Mark 4), and the interpretation insetted, are an a.ddition of «.^rk's. .... ihe iiroortant point for oar problem is that he introduces this tradition (iv.2) with the remark 'Tie t^u^hL theji ::.uffh in .-..a- and said to ^be-m in the course of His tench:'ng'. u<^

1. from ii adit ion to uo^pel,

2. ibid. t p. 236,

100

To be sure, the point that Dibelius is here trying to make is quite

a different one, but he does ascribe the use of Jesus' sayings for

exhortation (Paranesis) to the community, rather than to Jesus Him­

self.

We here discover one of the great weaknesses of Form Criticism;

its result is almost entirely negative, for even by its established

laws, it cannot show what underlies the tradition, but only how,

once it had come into being, it grewjinto the gospels as they were

written down. Dibelius is very careful to trace the "Sitz im Leben"

in which each form originated, but he cannot show where the material

came from that was thus formulated. Thus Form Criticism has multi­

plied the problems of exegesis, and reduced the degree of trust­

worthiness we can attribute to the individual passages, without any

compensating positive result.

And yet, this robs us no more than does Schweitzer's "stranger

and enigma" Jesus, who slips away from our age and returns to His

own, and is therefore irrelevant to our present-day needs. Small

wonder that "theology", thus impoverished, has turned so overwhelm­

ingly from extreme reliance on history to the opposite extreme re­

presented by the Barthians, with their uhrist who is "wholly other11 !;

the transcendent Word of God. This is, indeed, just what Schweitzer

himself has done with his Christ-mystic ism, by which he is related,

not to the eschatological, historical Jesus, but to the living,

reigning Christ whom he serves in the jungle of Africa.

c. A new estimate of Schweitzer.

The suggestion has been made by some who consider Schweitzer

101

"the greatest man in the world", that he did not in fact believe in

his eschatblbgical interpretation of the life of Jesus, but worked

out his hypothesis in an attempt to show the futility of trying to

write a "historical" life of Jesus. Schweitzer himself mentions

three such satirical "Lives", one of Luther, one of Napoleon, and

one of D. F. Strauss, all written to ridicule Strauss' first Life

of Jesus, in which so much was rejected as mythical.^ These apo­

logists for Schweitzer's greatness point out that his own alle­

giance to Christ is not dependent on his "historical Jesus", but on

the Christ whom he knows mystically, and obey? sacrificially. But

there is no hint in Schweitzer's own writings o£ any such satirical

purpose. To ascribe it to him one has to read between the lines of

his books something which is not there. The later German edition

of the Quest is just as dead in earnest as the earlier one which

was translated into English. And in My Lidfe and Thought, which ap­

peared in 1933, the only apology he makes for the eschatological

interpretation of the life of Jesus, which he carefully summarizes,

together with his motives for writing it, is the special chapter

dealing with "The Historical Jesus and the Christianity of Today."

In the opening paragraph of this chapter he writes:

"The satisfaction which I could not help feeling at having solved so many historical -riddles about the existence of Jesus, was accompanied by the painful consciousness that this new knowledge in the realm of history would mean un­ rest and difficulty for Christian piety."*- '

And he closes the chapter with these words:

"I find it no light task to follow my vocation, to put pressure on the Christian faith to reconcile itself in all sincerity with historical truth. But I have devoted my-

. My Life and Thought, p. 65.

102

self to it with joy, because I am certain that truthfulness in all things belongs to the spirit of Jesus."^

If he knew of this modern attempt to canonize him, he would undoubt­

edly point out that it springs from the same false motives which have

led theologians to insist on the inerrancy of Jesus, at the expense

of that devotion to historical truth for which he has been strug­

gling.

1. My Life and Thought, p. 75«

103

Chapter Three

ESCHATOLOGY AND ETHICS

1. Schweitzer's conception of Jesus' eschatology.

Albert Schweitzer did not, of course, invent the eschatology

of Jesus. It lay before him in the gospels. His contribution

lay in calling attention to its presence there, and the importance

attached to it especially by Mark and Matthew, and in trying to

explain the life of Jesus by it. In the early days of Christianity

it had formed an important part of the Christian faith. That Je­

sus should have been believed to have shared it was only natural,

since He was expected to be the centre of its fulfilment. Indeed^

we may well question whether, without the eschatological hope,

Christians could have endured the persecutions and martyrdoms

which were their lot in the first three centuries A.D., and so

have preserved their religion and handed it down to us. But as

years and centuries and even mULennia have passed without any

eschatological realisation of the Kingdom, faith in it has weak­

ened, until this feature of the Christian message, once at its

centre, has become for many, especially the scientific-minded,

one of the chief obstacles to its acceptance.

Yet accept it we must, in some form or other. As Schweitzer

points out:

"If Jesus did not take Himself to be the Messiah, this means the death-blow to the Christian faith. The judgment of the early Church is not binding upon us. The Christian religion is founded upon the Messianic consciousness of Jesus, whereby He himself in a signal manner distinguished His own person from the rank of other preachers of relig­ ious morality. If now He did not take Himself to be the

104

Messiah, then the whole of Christianity rests - to use hon­ estly a much perverted and abused word - upon a 'value judg­ ment 1 formed by the adherents of Jesus of Nazareth after His deathI" l

Thus the problem of Jesus' eschatology cannot be whether He had one,

but what He believed, and what significance He attached to His be­

liefs. In his interpretation of it, Schweitzer has adopted the most

literal point of view possible. This has had the inevitable effect

of emphasizing the incompatibility of early Christian hopes with

those of the present day. The question inanediately arises whether

a reinterpretation with such far-reaching consequences is justified.

Schweitzer is perfectly aware of these consequences:

"We are experiencing what Paul experienced. In the Very moment when we were coming nearer to the historical Jesus than men had ever come before, and were already stretching out our hands to draw Him into our time, we have been obliged to give up the attempt and acknowledge our failure in that paradoxical saying: 'If we have known Christ after the flesh yet henceforth know we Him no more.' And further we must be prepared to find that the histori­ cal knowledge of the personality and life of Jesus will not be a help, but perhaps even an offence to religion."^

Still he filt the effort justified because

"Truth is under all circumstances more valuable than non- truth, and this must apply to truth in the realm of his­ tory as to other kinds of truth. Even if it comes in a guise which piety finds strange and at first makes dif­ ficulties for her, the final result can never mean injury; it can only mean greater depth. Religion has, therefore, no reason for trying to atooid coining to terms with his­ torical truth. "^

First, then, we must examine the content of Jesus' eschatolog-

£ical beliefs. Schweitzer goes on the assumption that Jesus shared

1. Sketch, pp. 5-6.

2. Quest, Ist.ed., p, 399.

3. My Life and Thought, p. 65.

105

many of the beliefs which were current in His day. What these were

should be evident from the eschatological writings of that time, of

which a number have come down to us. But when we study these, we

find no unanimity of thought. Leckie, in his Kerr Lectures, seems

overwhelmed by

"the immense variety and confusion of its forms 11 }

and decides at the outset that

"We may reasonably doubt whether it will ever be pos­ sible to bring order out of all this perplexity, or to re­ duce to system the amazing variety of the eschatological forms." 2

R. H. Chatles, in his more exhaustive, though earlier, treatise on

Eschatology, Hebrew, Jewish, and ohristian, also notes this variety,

but since his purpose is historical rather than interpretative, he

is less confused by it. He points out that

"at all periods of the history of Israel there existed side by side in its religion incongruous and inconsistent elements",3

and adds:

"The recognition of these facts is of primary im­ portance when we deal with New Testament eschatology. In , the first place, we shall not be surprised if the eschatol- Xogy of the latter should, to some extent, present similar incongruous phenomena as the Old Testament and subsequent Jewish literature. And, in the next, we shall be prepared to deal honestly with any such inconsistencies. So far,

1. The World to Come and Final Destiny, p. 6. This book does, how­ ever, include as appendices a conspectus of the teachings of twelve Jewish apocalyptic works (pp.326-331), and a short comparative statement of Jewish and New Testament eschatology (pp.332-345).

2. ibid., p. 7.

3. A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life - the Jowett Lectures for 1398-1899, PP-309-310. This book bears on its back the title, Eschatology, Hebrew, Jewish, and Christian, and will be referred to hereinafter as Eschatology.

106

therefore, from attempting, as in the past, to explain them away or to bring them into harmony with doctrines that in reality make their acceptance impossible, we shall frankly acknowledge their existence, and assign to them their full historical value."1

Schweitzer is also aware of this variety of eschatological ex­

pectation at the time of Jesus. He lists it as part of the problem

in the first chapter of the Quest:

"Again, whereas in general a personality is to some ex­ tent defined by the world of thought which it shares with its contemporaries, in the case of Jesus this source of informa­ tion is as unsatisfactory as the documents.

"What was the nature of the contemporary Jewish world of thought? To that question no clear answer can )ae given. We do not know whether the expectation of the Messiah was generally current or whether it was the faith of a mere sect. With the Mosaic religion as such it had nothing to do. There was no organic connection between the religion of legal ob­ servance and the future hope. Further, if the eschatological hope was generally current, was it the prophetic or the apocalyptic form of that hope? We know the Messianic expec­ tations of the prophets; we know the apocalyptic picture as drawn by Daniel, and, following him, by u*noch and the Psalms of Solomon before the coming of Jesus, and by the Apocalypses of £,zra and Baruch about the time of the destruction of Jeru­ salem, but we do not know which was the popular form; nor, supposing that both were combined into one picture, what this picture really looked like. We know only the form of eschatol- ogy which meets us in the Gospels and in the Pauline epistles; that is to say, the form which it took in the Christian com­ munity in consequence of the coming of Jesus. And to combine these three - the prophetic, the late-Jewish apocalyptic, andthe Christian - has not proved possible."

tNor is it clear just what «esus believed:

"Even supposing we could obtain more exact information regarding the popular Messianic expectations at the time of Jesus, we should still not know what form they assumed in the self-consciousness of ^ne who knew nimself to be the Messiah but held that the time was not yet come for Him to reveal Himself as such. We only know their aspect from with­ out, as a waiting for the Messiah and the nessianic Age; we have no clue to their aspect from within as factors in the

1. flscriatology, p. 310.

2. guest, p. £.

107

Messianic self-consciousness. We possess no psychology of the Messiah, ^he Evangelists have nothing to tell us about it, because uesus told them nothing about it; the sources for the contemporary spiritual life inform us only concerning the eschat©logical expectation. For the form of the Messianic self-consciousness of desus we have to fall back upon con­ jecture. "1

We have already pointed out how perilous this dependence on con­

jecture is historically. It must be admitted, however, that Schweitzer

began inductively. He was first confronted with the eschatology of

Jesus during student days as he studied Matthew's account of the com­

mission to the twelve (it is only summarized in Mark):

"In Matthew x the mission of the Twelve is narrated. In the discourse with which He sends them out ffesus tells them that they will almost immediately have to undergo se­ vere persecution. But they suffer nothing of the kind.

"He tells them also that the appearance of the Son of Man will take place before they have gone through the cities of Israel, which can on^y mean that the celestial, Messi­ anic Kingdom will be revealed while they are thus engaged. He has, therefore, no expectation of seeing them return.

"How comes it that Jesus leads His disciples to expect events about which the remaining portion of the narrative is silent?

"I was dissatisfied with Holtzmann's explanation that we are dealing not with an historical discourse of Jesus, but with one made up at a later period, after His death, out of various *Sayings of Jesus'. A later generation would never have gome so far as to put into His mouth words which were belied by the subsequent course of events.

"The bare text compelled me to assume that Jesus really announced persecutions for the disciples, and, as a sequel to them, the immediate appearance of the celestial Son of Man, and that His announcement was shown by subsequent e- ¥ents to be wrong. But how came he to entertain such an expectation, and what must His feelings have been when e- vents turned out otherwise than He had aaHumed they would".'"2

These last questions did not receive an immediate answer. But it is

significant for an understanding of Schweitzer that they should oc­

cupy his attention rather than the previous question of which he

1. Quest, pp. 8-9-

2. My Life and Thought, p. 18.

108

disposed so easily - that o"f the authenticity of these sayings of Je­

sus. Yet on the whole it mast be condeded that he has been faithful

to the obvious meaning of the passage, and come to grips with it, in­

stead of trying to explain it away because it is inconvenient (al­

though he is guilty of using this tactic later on).

The whole matter was further complicated by Jesus' reply to the

107a

We have already pointed out above 'pp.95~0 b^ the dangers of such a literal and uncritical use ox speeches attributed to Jesus aiid the settings in which they are placed by the evangelists, in the light of ^orrn Oriticism. In the case of this particular passage (Matthew 10} t '''. Holtzmann's judgment, to which Schweitzer here objected, was vindicated "by the later research. Its composite na­ ture is demonstrated by Source Criticism as follows: vv.C-H & 14 are from Mark (b.8-11); vv.12-13,1^-lb, aild 2b-42 are from I, being parallel to scattered passages in Luke (lO.b-7,12,3; 12.2-5,51-53; 14-2b-27; 17»33); while vv.5-8 and 17-25 are peculiar to Matthew. Vs.17 is remin­ iscent of lit.24.^,13 = lik. 13.^-13 « Lk.21.12-17,10. The whole chapter is thus shown to be, after all, a collection of sayings of Jesus, originally spoken on various occasions, but joined together according to subject as an aid to memory, and later written down together.

On the other hand, Form Criticism would not deny that an authentic saying of Jesus underlay such a specific pro^ nouricement as vs.23» It would agree with Schweitzer that 11 A later generation would never have gone so far as to y.ut into His mouth words which were belied by the subse­ quent course of events." So this word, whether spoken at the mission to the twelve or on some other occasion, pre­ sents a problem, and is not to be lightly dismissed-

This is decidedly ingenious, the sort of original treatment

that makes Schweitzer such fascinating reading. It deals, however,

1. My Life and Thought, pp.18-19.

109

not with Jesus' eschatology, but with Schweitzer's corollary theory

of the Messianic secret, by which he seeks to explain how Jesus

came to be thought of as a teacher or rabbi, and why the eschato-

logicil passages in the gospels are sometimes obscure. We shallit-

deal with this whole matter later.

Meanwhile, Schweitzer's new understanding of Jesus' eschatol-

ogy was confirmed by what Jesus had to say of John the Baptist

after his messengers had departed:

"I was also driven into new paths of interpretation by Jesus saying to the disciples after the departure of the Baptist's messengers, that of all born of women John was the greatest, but that the least in the Kingdom of Heaven was greater than he (Matt.11.11).

"The usual explanation, that Jesus expressed in these words a criticism of the Baptist and placed him at a lower level than the believers in His teaching who were assem­ bled round Him as adherents of the Kingdom of God, seemed to me both unsatisfying and crude, for these believers were also born of women. By giving up this explanation I was driven to the assumption that in contrasting the Baptist with members of the Kingdom of God Jesus was taking into account the difference between the natural world and the supernatural, Messianic world. As a man in the condition into which all men enter at birth the Baptist is the great­ est of all who have ever lived. But members of the King­ dom of Heaven are no longer natural men; through the dawn of the Messianic Kingdom they have experienced a change which has raised them to a supernatural condition akin to that of the angels. Because they are now supernatural be­ ings the least among them is greater than the greatest man who has ever appeared in the natural world of the age which is now passing away. John the Baptist does, indeed, belong to this Kingdom wither as a great or humble member of it. But a unique greatness, surpassing that of all other human beings, is his only in his natural mode of existence."1

Here we have an expression of the "thoroughgoing" apocalyptic

expectation which Schweitzer attributes to Jesus. The Messianic

Kingdom is conceived as wholly future, and wholly supernatural,

1. jfo- Life and Thought, p. 19.

110

"Jesus, however, reached back after the (fundamental conception of the prophetic period, and it is only the form in -which He conceives of the emergence of the final event which bears the stamp of later Judaism. He no longer conceives of it as an intervention of God in the history of the nations, as did the Prophets; but rather as a final cosmical catastrophe* His eschatology is the apocalyptic of the book of Daniel, since the Kingdom is to be brought about by the Son of Man when He appears upon the clouds of heaven (Mk.3.33, 9.I)." 1

That such eschatological conceptions were current in Jesus' day

cannot be denied. The apocalyptic writings, from Dahiel on, refer

the Messianic Kingdom increasingly to the future, and to the super­

natural intervention of God. This fact is no doubt due to the

despair of those who were persecuted, especiilly those who were

mafctyred for their loyalty to liod. No human help seemed able to

deliver them in this life, so their faith in God prompted them to

9trust Him to do so in a future Kingdom.

On the other hand, it should be pointed out that in Jesus 1 day

there were also frequent cases of would-be human Messiahs who led

bands of zealots in insurrection against Rome. Buitmann gives a

substantial list of such Messianic movements,-^ and points out that

John the Baptist, probably3 and Jesus, certainly, were executed by

the authorities as dangerous agitators of this kind. There can

be no doubt, however, that such charges against Jesus were trumped

up by His enemies, and the gospels nowhere record any action on

His part (except possibly the Triumphal Entry - the cleansing of

the temple was a religious and not a political act) to suggest that

1. Sketch, pp.114-115-

2. See Charles, .hischatology, p. 17S.

3. Jesus and the Word, pp. 20-22.

4. ibid., pp.25-26.

Ill

He expected to establish His Kingdom in that way.

If the Kingdom is wholly future, and whoily supernatural, then

it follows that the Messiah, too, is wholly future and whoibly super­

natural. Jesus considers Himself, according to Schweitzer, as at

present only a man among men, although in the future Kingdom He ex­

pects to be the Messiah. And since blessing in the future depends

upon conduct in this life, He must live and act on earth as befits

one who is to be the i.iessiah in the future Kingdom.

"In this sense, then, Jesus' Messianic consciousness is futuristic. There was nothing strange in this either for Him or for His disciples. On the contrary, it corresponded ex­ actly to the Jewish conception of the hidden life and labour of the Messiah (Cf. Weber: System der altsynagogalen Theologie, 1880, pp. 324-A46). The course of Jesus' earthly life pre­ ceded His Messiahship in glory. The Messiah in His earthly estate must life and labour unrecognized, He must teach, and through deed and suffering He must be made perfect in right­ eousness. Not till then shall the Messianic age dawn with the Last Judgment and the establishment of the Kingdom."^

Of course, the Messiah was originally expected, by the nrophets,

to be an earthly king of Uavidic descent. But as the Kingdom became

projected into the future, so did the Messiah. Indeed, oharles notes

a disappearance of the messianic hope in the 2nd century B.C. (the

time of the Maccabees), and a revival of it in the 1st (when the Has-

moneans turned out to be as oppressive tyrants as the aeleucids they

had driven out). 2 In the Psalms of Solomon 17 & 18, the Old Testa­

ment hope for a militant Davidic Messiah reappears. But in the

Enoch literature, especially the Similitudes (Eth.En. 37-70), he is

replaced by the new figure of the Son of Man, an entirely supernat­

ural being, reminiscent of Daniel 7.13, who is both Judge of the

1. Sketch, p. 188.

112

world and Champion afid Ruler of the Righteous.

It will be remembered, of course, that Jesus' favourite title

for Himself, according to the Synoptic gospels, is Son of Man. He

rarely, if ever, called Himself by any other, and yet no one elde

ever addressed Him by that title. Schweitzer explains this pheno­

menon as follows:

"The Messianic title 'Son of Man 1 is futuristic in char­ acter. It refers to the moment in which the Messiah shall come upon the clouds of heaven for judgmnt. From the begin­ ning this was the sense in which Jesus had used the expression, whether in speaking to the people or to the disciples. In sending out His Apostles tie warned them of the impending ap­ proach of the day of the Son of Man (Mt.10.23). He spoke to the people of the coming of the Son of Man as an exhortation to be faithful to Him, Jesus (Mk.8.38).

"Withal, He and the Son of Man remain for the people and for the disciples two entirely distinct personalities. The one is a terrestrial, the other a celestial figure; the one belongs to the age that now is, the other to the Messianic period. Between the two there exists solidarity, inasmuch as the Son of Man will intervene in behalf of such as have ranged themselves on the side of Jesus, the herald of His comin

and he further explains:

11 'Son of Man 1 is accordingly the adequate expression of His Messiahship, so lortg as He, in this earthly aeon as Jesus of Nazareth, has occasion to refer to His future dig­ nity. , Hence when He speaks to the disciples about Himself as the Son of Man He assumes this duality of consciousness. 'The Son of Man must suffer and will then rise from the dead'; that is to say, 'As the one who is to be the Son of Man at the resurrection of the dead I must suffer!. To the same effect we must understand the word about serving: As the one who in the character of the son of Man is destined to the highest rule 1 must now humble myself to the lowliest service (Mk.10.45) Therefore He says when they come to arrest Him: The hour is come in which He who is to be the son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinners. (Mk.14.21,41).

"The problem about the son of Man is herewith eluci­ dated. It was not an expression which Jesus commonly used to describe Himself, but a solemn title which He adopted

1. oharles, aschatology. p. 214.

2. Sketch, pp. 191-192.

113

when in the great moments of His life He spoke about Him­ self to the initiated as the future Messiah, while before the others He spoke of the Son of Man as a personality distinct from Himself. In all cases, however, the context shows that ne is speaking of one who is yet to come, for in all these passages mention is made either of the Kesur- rection or of the appearing npon the clouds of heaven."1

This theory receives remarkable corroboration from the work of

iiudolph Otto. Otto's thesis is that Jesus actually knew the .&noch

literature, and that His own consciousness of mission led Him to2make use of Enoch's thought-fonus. He makes a special point of the

fact that after being translated to heaven, Enoch was revealed as

the Son of Man,-' and that

"Jesus knew Himself to be the filius hominis praedestinattts".^

Various other parallels are drawn in the chapters that follow - so

many of them in fact that he comes perilously near to discrediting

his own theory. For while he carefully states,

"7/e repeat: His consciousness of mission did not issue from such a previously formed idea, but from the constitution and essence of His person"^,

he then proceeds to treat the Son of Man utterances, and indeed the

whole concept, as iJ§ they were directly derived from Enoch. Of par­

ticular interest is his theory of the Messianic secret, which, though

derived from Enoch, closely resembles Schweitzer's.^ But this ia a

secondary point, to which we shall return later.

1. Sketch, pp.192-193'

2. The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, p. 213.

f. ibid., p. 208.

4. ibid., p. 219-

5. ibid., p. 213.

6. ibid., ch. VI.

114

Meanwhile, it must not be overlooked that the title "Son of

Man", in the Aramaic ^HX IJ^ has been declared by such eminent

scholars as Lietzmann, Wellhausen and rj. Schmidt to be equivalent

simply to "man" s or "human being". Even in Daniel 7 f it may have

only this meaning - the "Son of Man" who comes on the clouds of

heaven being contrasted with the various beasts which preceded him.

Schweitzer is aware of this. In the Quest> he states their case,

and then appeals to an equally eminent scholar, ualman, to refute*3'

it. A much simpler and more sensible argument is used by ii. F.

Scott, who points out: first, that although the church abandoned

use of the title son of Man, it was retained in the, traditional ac­

counts of what Jesus saidpsecond, although it may sometimes be in­

terpreted as meaning simply "man" (as in Mk. 2.10 & 28, and possibly

Mb.12.32, 8.20, & 11.0)9^ in some cases the evangelists seem to have

used it in place of a simnle "I":

"There still remain instances which cannot be removed without destroying the whole tiospel tradition; but it is fully evi­ dent that ; 'Son of man" was by no means a name which was habit-** ually used by Jesus. He had resort to it only on rare occa­ sions, and never without a definite purpose."^

This purpose he too finds reflected in the apocalyptic concept of

Daniel and Enoch5, and Jesus used it to assert His future Messiah-

shpp in spite of the sufferings that were to be His lot in this life.

1. Quest, pp, 276f,

2. Quest, pp. 278f. In the English edition. Burkitt has inserted a footnote (p.279) calling attention to the fact that Schweitzer has overstated Dalman's case.

3. The Kingdom and the Messiah, pp. 187 ff.

4. ibid., pp. 195-196.

5. ibid., p. 198. 6. ibid., pp. 204-205.

115

He concludes, therefore, that

"Jesus designated Himself the "Son of Man" in order to point men to His future destiny. His earthly life was in seeming contradiction to His great claim; yet they were to accept Him as the Messiah, in view of the part which He would enact here­ after. His work was as yet preparatory, but it was leading up to His ultimate manifestation as the Son of Man. This ac­ count of the name is borne out by the passages in which it is most clearly demonstrable that Jesus employed it. Invari­ ably they have reference to the final apocalyptic events to the inauguration of the Kingdom, the Judgmnt, the per­ fecting of the holy community."!

But although, according to Schweitzer, Jesus conceived of the

Kingdom as future, in the sense of being tr^nscendentally different

from the present, He did not believe it was far off in time - in

fact, he itfas sure it would break in it any moment. As we have seen,

Schweitzer takes the words; "Ye shall not have gone over the cities

of Israel till the Son of Man be come" (Matt.10.23), to mean that

Jesus expected it before the twelve returned from their mission.

This sense of immediacy is a familiar feature of apocalyptic thought.

Its purpose, of course, is to encourage the saints to believe that

their sufferings are nearly over, oharles traces the recasting of

the hope from Jeremiah down to 4 Ezra, showing how each writer ex­

pected deliverance in his own time.^ The same thing is observable

in the Christian book of Revelation, and in the "Synoptic apocalypse"

in Mark 13 and parallels. So this sense of immediacy was in the

1. The Kingdom and the Messiah, p. 20£. The fact that Scott, in the course of his argument, mentions his theory that Aesus 1 Messianic consciousness developed during His ministry (p. 201), floes not affect his conclusion that Jesus interpreted His Messiahship in eschato- logical terms. W. Manson (Jesus the Messiah, p. 34) takes definite issue with "the school of Schweitzer" on this point.

2. Eschatology, pp. 171-173-

3. It is still observable today in popular "prophetic" groups, which are constantly discovering in Scripture references of all kinds, and even in such unscriptural sources as the great pyramid of £gypt, in-

116

air in Jesus' day. John the Baptist had appeared with his call to

repentance and threat of judgment. And Jesus' own first recorded

public preaching was, according to Mark (1.15): "The time is ful­

filled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; reDent and believe the

gospel." This is the same message that the twelve were to nro-

claim: "As ye go, preach, saying, The Kingdom of uod is at hand"

(Lft.10.7). Schweitzer says of this:

"The commission, however, is anything but a summary of the 'teaching of uesus'. It does not in the least con­ template instruction of a thoroughgoing kind, rather what ±S in question is a flying proclamation throughout Israel. The one errand of the Apostles as teachers is to cry out everywhere the warning of the nearness of the kingdom of God - to the intent that all may be warned and given op­ portunity to repent."1

One indication of the nesrness of the Kingdom is the signs and

miracles which Jesus.performed. This comes out in His answer to

the scribes who tried to discredit Him by suggesting that He cast

out demons by Beelzebub. Said He: "No one can enter the house of

a strong man and spoil his goods, unless he first bind the strong

man, and then he vdll spoil his housed (Mk.3.27). On this Schweit­

zer coniments:

"For Jesus the signs signified the nearness of the King-

dications of the end of the world, and the coming of the Kingdom of God. One group of American Adventists, for example, interprets the \jod and Magog passage in Jiizekiel 3$ as referring to fiussia, and the present troubles in Palestine as preparation for a great battle on the literal plain of Armageddon. Within a month after the first announcement of the atomic bomb, a newspaper quoted a prediction that it was the instrument whereby God would fulfill the destruc­ tion foretold in II Peter 3.10: "But the day of the Lord shall come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a loud noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned ut>."

1. Sketch, p,

117

dom in a sense still higher than the purely temporal, chrono­ logical nearness. .... The meaning of this parable is, in fact, not exhausted by the thought that evil spirits do not undemine their own dominion by rising u~ against one another. * . ., . The casting out of demons, therefore, signified for Jesus the binding of the power of ungodlines^ and rendering it harmless",-^

in preparation for the Kingdom .

Schweitzer finds a similar meaning in the parables of the sower,

the self -growing seed, the mustard seed in Mark 4, all of which are

intended to reveal "the mystery of the Kingdom of God" (Mark.4.1l).

The point of all these parables, according to him, is the great re­

sult that comes from so small a beginning - that and nothing more.

"What these parables emphasize is, therefore, so to speak, the in itself negative, inadequate^ character of the initial fact, upon which, as by a miracle, there follows in the appointed time, through the power of God, some great thing. They lay stress not upon the natural but upon the miraculous character of such occurrences."^

Again in this Schweitzer is seconded by Otto. He, too, sees Jesus'

eJtorcisms as Crod's victory over s

"The stronger one (i.e. God Himself), who had stripped him of his armour, now proceeds to take from him his spoil through the working of the exorcist Jesus, who was sent by God and is working vdth nis (God's) power."-'

And the parables of Mark 4 bring the same message (in fact, Otto

combines the parables of the sower rand the seed growing of itself

on literary grounds)?

"Two processes are compared: the one ordinary, well known, its familiar features repeated every year; the other a spir- ^itual and invisible process. The former was meant to be an analogy to make the latter known, understood, and graphic, its peculiar quality shining before the eye of the hearer. "^

1. SKetch, p. 143.

2. Quest, p. 354. / 4. ibid, p. 117.

3* The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, p. 102

118

"The Kingdom of God grows in the same way, quietly, secretly, un­ seen by dim eyes. It develops and grows by divine not human power; works and grows in a way that he does not know, mysteriously, by its own power, automates. It ripens in 'fruits of righteousness 1 , in some cases thirty-fold, in others sixty-fold, in others a hun­ dredfold - and all this as God's seed, not as man's deed."l

Otto parts company with Schweitzer in one important respect, how­

ever. His predilection for the Lucan account of the Beelzebub scene

leads him to believe that Jesus considered the Kingdom as in some sense

already present. For according to Like (11.20), Jesus adds: "If I by

the finger of God cast out demons, then the Kingdora of God has really

come (ephthasen) upon you."2 The Greek tense is aorist, indicating a

single past event. 0£to also interprets the passage about forcing the

Kingdom (Mb.11.12) by taking "biazetai" as middle instead of passive,

to mean "From the days of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of God

exercises its force."3 This point of view affects his interpretation

of the seed parables, especially the one about the seed growing of it­

self .4 And he finds his theory still further supported by the cele­

brated saying recorded by Luke (17.21) about the Kingdom "in your midst"5,

as contrasted with the statement in Mark 9.1 about its future coming

"with power". 0

On the basis of these same verses, W. Manson makes this even

stronger:

"The future and higher sphere of glory already in a real sense pene­ trates and intersects this sphere of humiliation through the power of the Spirit."'' '"This is not all an enthusiastic prolepsis of the things to come. It means that the world is not left simply to itself,but stands,

1. The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, pp

2. ibid.. £. 102. 4. ibid., p. 118..^^ 6. ibid., p. l47«

3. ibid., P- 108, 5. ibid., p. 131,

7. Jesus the Messiah, p. 208.

119

despite all demonism, under the power and, by grace, within the range of the salvation of God and this would seem the first of the certitudes for which fibeus the Messiah stands."!

In his earlier discussion of these texts, he found confirmation that

"Jesus in his characteristic words about the Kingdom of u-od rea­ sons from the present events and experiences to the coining of that Kingdom, not vice versa."^

This, it will be observed, is the exact opposite of Schweitzer's empha­

sis on the "dogmatic" element in Jesus' concept of history:

"Eschatology is simply 'dogmatic history' - history as moulded by theological beliefs - which breaks in upon the natural course of history and abrogates it. Ife it not even a priori the only con­ ceivable view that the conduct of one who looked forward to His :fessiani.c 'Parousia' in the near future should be determined, not

r\ J

by the natural course of events, but by that expectation?"-^

This is of course a Rhetorical question, to which Schweitzer can con­

ceive of only one answer - Yes,- Mans on' s answer would be a virtual No.

C. H. Dodd finds the idea of the present Kingdom even in the par­

able of the Sower, and the other "parables of growth". He writes:

"The 'eschatological' school, rightly, as I think, lays the stress where it falls in the parable as told, upon the abundant crop; but when they proceed to apply it to the suttden breaking-in of the King­ dom of God which they suppose Jesus to have expected in the near future, they do not seem to me to be keeping closely to the data."^

He even accuses the school of "konsequente Esehatologie" of compromise!

"In the presence of one set of sayings which appeared to contemplate the coming of the Kingdom of God as future, and another set which appeared to contemplate it as already present, they offered an in­ terpretation which represented it as coming very, very soon. But this is no solution."5

One reasortyrhy Schweitzer can have ̂ concept ion of such a present

effect of the Kingdom is that the Lucan passages do not enter his dis-

1. #esus the Messiah, p. 209- 2. ibid., p. 78.

3. Quest, p. 349

4. The Parables of the Kingdom, p. 182. 5. ibid., p. 49.

120

cussion.l The Matthew passage on which he depends is notorious for

the difficulty it has given exegetes. He devotes three paragraphs of

the juest to discussing various solutions, including the "usual" one,

that it supports

"the 'presence 1 of the Kingdom. This is the line taken by <,endt, Wernle, and Arnold Meyer. According to the last named it means: 'From the days of John the Baptist it has been possible to get possession of the Kingdom of God; yea, the righteous are every day earning it for their own'. But no explanation has heretofore succeeded in making it any degree intelligible how Jesus could date the presence of the Kingdom from the Baptist, whom in the same breath He places outside the Kingdom, or why, in order to express so simple an idea, He uses such entirely unnatural and inappropriate expressions as 'rape 1 and 'wrest to themselves'."^

We shall have occasion later to see what Schweitzer makes of this dubi-*

ous passage.

Besides the general idea that the Kingdom and the Messiah are both

supernatural and future, though shortly to appear, Schweitzer finds in

Jesus' eschatology certain more specific doctrines. Some of these have

to do with the times of the end, just before the coming of the Kingdom.

Sirst there is the matter of the Messianic woes or afflictions ofc

tribulation. It will be remembered that when Jesus sent out the twelve

in Matthew 10, besides predicting the coming of the Son of Man, He also

predicted persecutions.

1. In the German edition of the Quest,(p. 396), Schweitzer has added this footnote:

"Von Lukas wird in dieser Darstellung abgesehen, weil er in den Hauptsachen mit den beiden ersten Evangelisten Ubereinstimmt. Was wr ttber sie hinaus berichtet, ist nicht besonders vertrauenerweckend, da es zum Teil autf unmOglichen Voraussetzungen - die Reise von Galilaa nach Jerusalem geht durch Samarial - beruhfc, zum Teil durch gewisse heidenfreundliche und soziale Anschauungen tendenzibs bestimmt ist. - Die literarischen Probleme dieses Evangeliums sind noch nicht gelttst. Auf die Frage, woher das lukanishhe Sondergut stamme, ist noch keine befriedigende Antwort gegeben worden. Jedoch lasst sich schon soviel erkennen, dass es sich urn rein literarische und nicht urn geschicht- liche Probleme handelt."

. Quest, p. 265«

121

"To put it more accurately, the prediction of the appearing of the Son of L'an in Matt. 10.23 runs up into a prediction of suf­ ferings, which, working up to a climax, forms the remainder of the discourse at the sending forth of the disciples."-*-

This is another familiar feature of the apocalypses. Its original

purport Was that the persecutions of the saints were the last futile

attack of evil against righteousness, and would soon be overeome by

the appearance of the Son of Man.

"The view that the world's history will terminate in the cul­ mination of evil, and that Israel will be delivered by super­ natural help in the moment of its greatest need, derives orig­ inally from Ezekiel, and after reproduction in various forms in his spiritual successors attains to classical expression in Daniel, and henceforth becomes a permanent factor in Jew­ ish apocalyptic."2

In proof that this was part of Jesus' esehat©logical expectation,

Schweitzer points out:

"The foretelling of the sufferings that belong to the eschatological distress is part and parcel of the preaching of the approach of the Kingdom of God. . . It is for that reason that the thought of suffering appears at the end of the Beatitudes and in the closing petition of the Lord's Prayer. For the Tnnp^utfs which is there in view is not an individual psychological temptation, but the general eschato­ logical time of tribulation, from which God is besought to exempt those who pray so earnestly for the coining of the Kingdom, and not to expose them to that tribulation by way of putting them to the test."3

Jesus Himself expected to share in these woes, says Schweitzer:

"But what was to be the fate of the future Son of Man during the Messianic woes of the last times? It appears as if it was appointed for Him to share the persecution and the suffering. He says that those who shall be saved must take up their cross and follow Him (Matt.10.33), that His followers must be willing to lose their lives for His sake, and that only those who in this time of terror confess their allegiance to Him, shall be confessed by Him before His

1. Quest, p. 359-

2. Charles, Eschatology, pp.121-122.

3. Quest, p. 362.

122

heavenly Father (Matt.10.32). Similarly, in the last of the Beatitudes, He had pronounced those blessed who were despised and persecuted for His sake (Matt.5.11-12). As the future bearer of the supreme rule He must go through the deepest humiliation. There is danger that His followers may doubt Him. Therefore, the last words of His message to the Baptist, jBst at the time when He had sent forth the twelve, is 'Bless­ ed is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me!(Matt,11.6). lfl

Along with the predictions of persecution, there was also a pre­

diction of the outpouring of the Spirit.

"And as a matter of fact Jesus predicts to the disciples in the same discourse that to their own surprise,* supernatu­ ral wisdom will suddenly speak from their lips, so that it will not be they but the Spirit of God who will answer the great ones of the earth. As the Spirit is for Jesus and early Christian theology something concrete which is to descend upon the elect among mankind only in consequence of a definite event - the outpouring of the Spirit which, according to the prophecy of Joel, whould precede the day of judgment - Jesus must have antidipated that this would occur during the absenceof the disciples, in the midst of the time of strife and con­ fusion. "^

This refers, of course, to Joel 2.28-31:*

"And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pout? out % Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions; And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out My Spirit. And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, bihood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon imto blood, before the great and terri­ ble day of the Lord come."

Since Peter used this prophecy in his sermon at Pentecost, we may

concede that it was probably known to Jesus in that sense as well.

A third pr«-Messianic manifestation also seems to be prophetic

rather than apocalyptic in origin: the reappearance of Jilijah,

foretold by Malachi 4.5-6:

"Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming

1. Quest, pp.369-370.

2. ibid., p. 360,

123

of the great and terrible day of the Lord; and he shall turn the hearts.

Of this passage Schweitzer writes:

"Die Erwartung des Elias, von der Henoch, der ^salter Salomon, die Schmone-Esre und die Apokalypsen Baruch und Esra schweigen, beshhaftigt den Nazarener auf das lebhafteste."!

and adds this footnote*

"Diese Vorstellung wird Maleachi 3.23-24 (sic) zum erstenmal entwickelt und von Jesus Sirach (4&.10-11) akzeptiert. Dass die apokajbyptischen Schriften sie nicht erwahnen, ist auffal- lig. In der Mischna taucht sie wieder auf und gibt zu den mannigfachsten Koramentaren uber Aufgabe und Machtbefugnis des wiederstandenen Propheten Anlass. (Siehe Klausner, S. 5B-63). Man hat den Eindruck, dass sie ihren Platz in der spateren Eschatologie dem schriftgelehrten Studium verdankt. Ob sie es zur Zeit Jesu schon zu einer allgemeinen Bedeutung gebra.cht hatte, lasst sich nicht entscheiden. Die Bemerkung der Jtlnger beim Abstieg vom Verklarungsberge raacht es wahr- scheinlich (Mk.9.11)."2

The reference in Matt.11.14 would also seem to indicate that Jesus

knew and accepted this prophecy. But to admit this is not to sanc­

tion the strange and exaggerated use made of it by Schweitzer in

developing his Mystery of the Messiahship (see below).

Also related to the last days is the idea ofl the resurrection.

Schweitzer begins his discussion of it in this ways

"What is the significance of the resurrection-prophe­ cies? It seems to us hard to admit that Jesus could have foretold so precisely an event of this sort. It seems much more plausible to suppose that general utterances of His a- bout a glory that awaited Him were editorially transformed ex eventu into predictions of the Resurrection. "3

Having stated this difficulty, he then proceeds to dispose of it by

pointing out the eschatological meaning of the Resurrection?

1. Quest, Ger. ed., p* 311.

2. ibid., p. 311, footnote.1.

3. Sketch, p. 201.

*

124

"Such criticism is in place so long as one holds the view that the prophecy of the Resnurection referred to an isolated event in the personal history of Jesus. So it appears, how­ ever, only to our modern consciousness, because we think unes- chatologically even in the matter of the Resurrection. For Jesus and His disciples, on the other hand, the Resurrection which He spoke about had an entirely different significance. It was a Messianic event which signified the dawn of the full glory that was to come. We must eliminate from the Resurrec­ tion predicted by Jesus all modern notions suggestive of an apotheosis. The contemporary consciousness understood this 'Restoration' (Acts 3«2l) as a revelation of Jesus 1 Lfessiah- ship at the dawn of the Kingdom. Therefore when Jesus* spoke of His resurrection the Disciples thought of the great Mes­ sianic Resurrection in which He as the Messiah would be raised from the dead."l

Nor would He be raised alone, but with His appearance would come the

general Resurrection and the Judgaant:

"The 'Resurrection of the dead' was, in fine, only the mode in which the transformation of the whole form of exis­ tence was accomplished upon those who had already succmahed to death. By the coming of the Kingdom of Uod, however, the earthly form of existence in general must be raised to an­ other and an incomparably higher estate, j^rom this point of view, those also are to experience a * resubtraction' who be­ fore the great event have not succumbed to death; for by a

* higher power their mode of existence, too, will suddenly be transformed into another, which they will then share with those "fc/hat have been awakened from death."^

In support of this interpretation :.he adduces the "primitive Christ­

ian conception" expressed by Paul in I Cor.15.50-54:

"Flesh and blood, whether quick or dead, can in no wise have part in the Kingdom. Therefore when the hour strikes and the dead are raised incorruptible, the living also shall be changed, putting on incorruption and immortality."^

If this was the early Christian view, it may reasonably be accepted

as that of Jesus and His disciples.

1. SttSftth, pp. 201-202.

2. ibid., pp. 205-206.

3. ibid.,p. 20g.

125

Any complete exposition of Schweitzer's conception of Jesus'

eschatology must take notice of two additional features. One is pre­

destination.

"The predestinarian view goes along with the eschatology. It is pushed to its utmost consequences in the closing inci­ dent of the parable of the marriage of the King's son (iiatt. 22.1-14) where the man who, in response to a publicly issued invitation, sits down at the table of the King, but is recog­ nized from his appearance as not called, is thrown out into perdition. 'Many are called but few are chosen.'"1

For Schweitzer this seems to mean that Jesus always recognized the

overruling omnipotence of the will of God in all matters pertaining

to the coming of the Kingdom. It determined how Jesus presented His

message.

"Only the phrase, 'Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand' and its variants belong to the public preaching. . . . All that goes beyond this simple phrase must be publicly pre­ sented only in parables, in order that those only, who are shown to possess predestination by having the initial know­ ledge which enables them to understand the parables, may re­ ceive a more advanced knowledge, which is imparted to them ..in a measure corresponding to their original degree of know­ ledge: 'Unto him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath' (Mk.4. 24-25)."2

This same thing crops up in the story of the rich young man, who would

not give up hi,s riches^ and so rejected the Kingdom,

"But immediately afterwards Jesus makes the suggestion, 'With men it is impossible, but not with God, for with God all things are possible' (Fark 10.17-27). That is, He will not give up the hope that the young man, in spite of appearances, which are s against him, will be found to have belonged to the Kingdom of God, solely in virtue of the secret all-powerful will of uod."3

Schweitzer even finds predestination in the beatitudes:

1. Quest, p. 352.

2. ibid., p. 352.

3. ibid., p. 353-

126

"Blessed are the poor in spirit'. Blessed are the raeekl Blessed are the peacemakers! - that does not mean that by virtue of being poor in spirit, meek, peace-loving, they deserve the Kingdom. Jesus does not intend the saying as an injunction or exhortation, but as a simple statement of fact: in their being poor in spirit, in their meekness, in their love of peace, it is made manifest that they are predestined to the Kingdom. By the possession of these qualities they are mafcked as belonging to it. In the case of others ( Matt. J. 10-12) the predestination to the Kingdom is made manifest by the persecutions which befall them in this world. "1

But the predestination of God does not mean that man, or even Jesus,

knows who the elect are. That is why He gives His life a ransom

"for many" (Mk.10.45).

"The enigmatic WxXpt for whom Jesus died ate those pre­ destined to the Kingdom."

Likewise, the coming of the Kingdom is predestined by God, and the

details of its coming are subject to His almighty will. He could

hasten or delay it, He could decide who should suffer the final per­

secutions. These facts were borne in on Jesus by the fact that the

Kingdom did not come at the time He expected it.

"That meant - not that the Kingdom was not near at hand - but that God had appointed otherwise in regard to the time of trial. He had heard the Lord's Prayer in which Jesus and His followers prayed for the coming of the Kingdom - and at the same time, for deliverance from the ire ipoiaufs . The time of trial was not come; therefore God in His nfercy and omnipotence had eliminated it from the series of eschatological events. "3

The prayer in Gethsemane is also addressed to the possibility that

God could spare even Jesus from death.St"

"Here also it is once more made clear that for Jesus the necessity of His death is grounded in dogma, not in external

1. Quest, p. 353.

2. Quest, p. 3S8.

3. Quest, p. 3*7.

127

historical facts, Above the dogmatic eschatological necessity, however, there stands the omnipotence of God, which is bound by no limitations. As Jesus in the Lord's Prayer had taught His followers to pray for deliverance from the tteipwcpor, and ms in His fears for the three He bids them pray for the same thing, so now He Himself prays for deliverance, even in this last moment when He knows that the armed band which is coming to arrest Him is already on the way. Literal history does not exist for Him, only the will of God; and this is exalted even above eschtological necessity."

To be sure, these last instances go beyond the usual meaning of the

term predestination, and Schweitzer does not actually use it here.

But this emphasis on God's omnipotence is the same as in the other

cases. And they show in what sense Schweitzer considers Jesus

bound by eschatolibgy and by ttod's holy will.

Closely related to this thought is Schweitzer's conception of

the meaning of the sacraments. In a way, the latter represent the

reverse side of predestination. Here the idea is that of "sealing"

the elect unto the Kingdom, so that they may have assurance of

coining through the tribulation and the judgment, and into the King­

dom which they usher in. Schweitzer traces this concept back to

the Passover in Egypt, and finds the first eschatological expres­

sion of it in Ezekiel 9, then follows it through the Psalms of

Solomon, Paul, and Revelation to the shepherd of Hermas. He con­

cludes,

"it may be assumed in advance that it will be found in some form or other in the so strongly eschatological teaching of Jesus and the Baptist."^

To demonstrate this with regard to the Baptist is fairly easy:

"It is a mistake to regard baptism with water as a 'symbolic

T. Quest, p. 390.

2. Quest, p. 376. See the discussion beginning on p. 375.

128

act' in the modern sense, and make the Baptist decry his own wares by saying, 'I baptize only with water, but the other can baptize with the Holy Spirit 1 . He is not contrasting the two baptisms, but connecting them - he who is baptized by him has the certainty that he will share in the outpouring of the Spirit which shall precede the judgment, and at the judgment shall receive forgiveness of sins, as one who is signed frith the mark of repentance. The object of being baptized by him is to secure baptism with the Spirit later."1

He might have added,though he did not, that a similar connection is

found in Acts, as for example in Peter 1 s call to baptism at Pente­

cost, and later the remarkable instance of the conversion of oorne-

lius, who received the Spirit , and so had to be given water baptism,

But when it comes to Jesus' sacrament, Schweitzer's interpreta­

tion is, to say the least, far-fetched. He begins reasonably enough

with the idea of the Messianic feast, which is certainly an eschato-r

logical concept, and was originally a part of the joys of the future

Kingdom. In a long footnote, he traces it from Isaiah through Enoch

and the Testament of Levi to ?ktthew and Revelation.^ So far, all

this is good research, and the Matthew passages^ can be rightly ta­

ken to establish Jesus' acquaintance with this particular phase of

the Messianic hope. Likewise, in Das Abendmahlsppoblem, he seems

justified in finding a reference to the same thought in Jesus' "es-

chatologische Schlusswort" at the Lord's Supper:

"Truly I tell you that I shall not again flrink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the King­ dom of God. "4-

Not quite so certain is his next step: the fact that, in Mark, this

1. Quest, p. 376,

2. See Quest, p. 377. This footnote is in the first edition only.

3. Matthew 8.11-12, 22.1-14, 25.1-13.

4. Mark 14.25.

129

statement follows so closely after the "parable" of the "blood of the

new covenant" (Mk.14.24), leads him to ascribe some kind of eschato-

logical significance to the Supper itself:

"Nicht von seinaa Tod, sondern von seinem Tod und der baldigen Wiedervereinigung mit ihnen beim Mahle im neuen Reich hat Jesus ttujden Seinen geredet. .... Beim letzten Mahl handiit Jesus als Messias, und zwar als leidender Messias."^

But just what this connection means he leaves to be discovered in the

sequel, that is, the Sketch.

When we turn to the latter, however, we find this matter discuesed,

interestingly enough, not in connection with the concluding events in

Jerusalem, but much sooner, in what is usually called the feeding of

the 5000 (or the 4000, for to Schweitzer these are * doubleteof the

same event). Of this event, he insists:_

"The occasion was a solemn cultus-meal!"*

He arrives at this astonishing conclusion because

"The description of the distribution of the bread in the two cases corresponds perfectly."3

Are we to believe,then, that on no other occasion when Jesus ate with

His disciples, He blessed, brake, or distributed the bread? The fact

that Mark mentions no other such occasion can hardly prove that Jesus 1

action in these two cases is unique, especially in the face of Luke

24.30-31, where the disciples at Emmaus are represented as recogniz­

ing Him by the fact that He acted in this apparently habitual way.

Schweitzer would seem here to fall under his own condemnation of the

"liberals":

1. Das Abendmahlsproblem. pp. 61 & 62.

2. Sketch, p. 169. Schweitzer also italicized this sentence.

3. Sketch, p. 170.

130

"In reality, however, there is not a word of all this in the Evangelist, and when his interpreters are asked what are the hints and indications on which they base their assertions they have nothing to offer save argumenta e

Indeed, it is most surprising that he should advance-;; as historical

a theory that first finds expression in the Fourth Gospel (ch.6),

where the story of the miraculous feeding leads up to the discourse

on the "bread of life". But that is just what he does, although of

course on different grounds. He goes on:

"Hence the solemn act of distribution constitutes the essence, as will of that meal by the seashore, as of that last meal with His disciples. The 'Lord's Supper' is a name appropriate to both, for that meal by the sea also took place at the evening hour. Mk.6.35-' And when the day was now far spent His disciples came to Him, etc. Here the table-company is composed of the great multitude of be­ lievers in the Kingdom: at the Last Supper it was limited to the circle of the disciples. The celebration, however, was the same. "2

And its meaning?

"As one who knew Himself to be the Messiah, and would be manifested to them as such at the imminent dawn of the King^ dom, He distributes, to those whom He expects to join Him at the Messianic banquet, sacred food, as though He would give them therewith an earnest of -their participation in that future solemnity. "3

In this sense, then, the multitude are "sealed" unto the Kingdom by

this "eschatological sacrament". And this is also, as it turns out,

the expected solution to the Abendmahlsproblem:

"The supper by the seaside and the supper at Jerusalem therefore correspond completely, except that in the latter Jesus signified to His disciples the nature of the ceremony and at the same time expresses the thought of the Passion in the two parables ('my body - my blood'). The cultus- raeal was the same: a foretaste of the Messianic banquet in

1 Quest, p. 330.

2. Sketch, p. 170.

3. Sketch, p. 172. All italicized.

131

the circle of the fellowship of the believers in the Kingdom. Now for the first time one is able to understand how the nature of the Last Supper can be independent of the two par­ able s."^

As a matter of fact, however, this theory, as well as being far­

fetched, defeats itself. For if Jesus had already once"sealed" the

disciples into the Kingdom on the shores of Galilee, what possible

motive could He have for repeating the process before His death? If

the analogy with John's baptism is correct, then one celebration of

the sacrament should be sufficient for each individual. And so far

as we know, all of the twelve were present at the feeding of the

-multitude. This would make the Last Supper superfluous. At the

same time, Schweitzer 1 s solution does not explain how the early church

came to repeat the sacrament, for if it depended on the distribution

of the elements by the Messiah-to-be, then there could be no point in

c&iebrating it when He Was not present. Thus, in the end, although

apparently without knowing it, Schweitzer has placed himself in the

anomalous position of trying so hard to avoid the horns of his own

dilemma^that he has impaled himself on both 1. By seeking a new prin­

ciple which should explain both what Jesus was attempting to do in

the upper room and how the early church came to repeat it, he has

succeeded in explaining neither.

2. The Mysteries of the life of Jesus.

In the above discussion of the Lord's Supper, we have dis­

covered the biggest stumbling-block to Schweitzer's reconstruction

of the life of Jesus - his penchant for mysteries, the solution of

1. Sketch, pp. 173-174.

2. See Das Abendmahlsproblem, pp.37-38, and above p. 12,

132

which is obscure, and only to be discovered by clever deductions

from very meagre clues. In all, he finds three distinct mysteries

%o be solved. He calls them the Mystery of the Kingdom of God, the

Mystery of the Messiahship, and the Mystery of the Passion. He

chose the latter two: Das Messianitats- und Leidensgeheimnis, as

the title of his sketch of the life of Jesus in the German. Lowrie,

taking note of the first, called his English translation of it The

Mystery of the Kingdom of God, although in the text he usually

translates Geheimnis by Secret.

a. The Ifystery of the Kingdom of God.

Schweitzer had observed, in his study of Matthew ch.10, that

Jesus' predictions were not fulfilled - for the disciples did re­

turn from their mission, and the Son of Man still had not come.

What led Jesus to make this prediction? Why did He expect the

Kingdom to come at just that time? Schweitzer finds the answer in

the first of the three mysteries, that of the Kingdom of God.

This notion of a "mystery of the Kingdom of God" he finds in

Mark 4.11: "To you the mystery of the Kingdom of God has been given,

but to those outside all things come in ^arables." Jesus spoke

these words to His disciples after telling the parable of the sower.

But for Schweitzer, as for most scholars,

"The detailed interpretation of the description of this loss (of the seed), and the application to particular classes of men, as it lies before us in Mk.4.13-20 is the Droduct of a later view which perceived no longer any secret in the par­ ables."!

So he must discover the mystery elsewhere:

1. Sketch, pp.lOV-lOB.

133

"The mystery must therefore contain the explanation trhy the Kingdom must now come, and how men are to know how near it is. For the general fact that it is very near had already been openly proclaimed both by the Baptist and Jesus. The mys­ tery, therefore, must consist of something more than that. f| l

And the "something more" is that Jesus expected the Kingdom, for

which John the Baptist had sown the seed in the spring, to come at

the time of the summer harvest I Here surely Schweitzer's ingenuity

gets the better of his good sense, it is one thing to say that

"the Kingdom of God ;nust follow as certainly as harvest fol­ lows seed-sowing", ̂

and quite another to deduce from it:

"If we look into the thought more closely we see that the coming of the Kingdom of God is not only symbolically or analogically, but also really and temporally connected with the harvest. "3

Nor does the introduction at this point of yjatt. 9=37-3 3:

"The harvest is great, but the labourers £ew, therefore pray the Lord of the harvest that He may send labourers into His harvest", 4

which occurs just before the mission bfi the twelve, really give

any support to this theory. That a certain non sequitur is in­

volved, Schweitzer himself seems to realize, for he attempts to con

firm his argument with what is obviously intended as a conclusive

statement :

"Whatever may be thought of this attempt to divine his­ torically the secret of the jftingdom of God, there is one thing that cannot be got away from, viz. that the initial fact to which Jesus points, under the figure of the sowing,

1. Quest, pp.353-354*

2. ibid., p. 354.

3. ibid., p. 355.

4. ibid., p. 355.

134

is somehow or other connected with the eschatological nreach- ing of repentance, which had been begun bv the Baptist."

Yet even this is a supposition, ingenious but not cogent, the sort

of "key" which schweitzer must have in order to solve historical

problems. It is certainly very poor evidence in support of the con­

tention that Jesus expected the Kingdom at that particular time.

No more conclusive is his interpretation of the notably diffi­

cult passage about forcing the Kingdom, which he brings in at this

point. The saying was spoken, according to Matthew, while the

twelve were still away on their mission, and just after Jesus' en­

igmatic reply to the messengers of the Baptist. He said:

"From the days of John the Baptist even until now, the King­ dom of Heaven is subjected to violence, and the violent wrest it to themselves.-^

Schweitzer takes this to mean that

"It is the host of nenitents (now responding to the preach­ ing of the twelve) which is wringing it from crod, so that it may now come at any moment."-'

This idea is more fully developed in the Sketch, where he traces

it toack to an old scribal tradition:

"By the observance of the Law the promised glorious estate is to be wrung from God. Not the individual but the collec­ tivity influences God through the Law. This generic mode of thought is the primary, the individual mode is secondary. 'Israel would be redeemed if only it observed two Sabbaths faithfully' (Schabbath 113b. Wtinsche, System der altsyna- gogalen Palestinensischen Theologie, 1&80, p. 299)."^

We must return to this complex of ideas when we consider Schweitzer's

1. Quest, p. 355.

2. Matt.11.125

3. Quest, pp.355-356.

4. sketch, pp.113-114.

135

special theory of Interim-ethics. For the present it? is sufficient

to point out that all this is fufcther assertion, rather than proof,

of the theory that Jesus actually expected the Kingdom to come at

that particular tiiae.l

From the foregoing discussion, it will appear how little real

historical basis there is for Schweitzer's reconstruction of the

central events in the life of Jesus, on which his whole structure

is built, There is the one solid text: "Ye shall not have gone over

the cities of Israel until the Son of Man comes" (Matt.10.23), which

first caught his attention, and which, it must be conceded, may well

be genuine. But it is one thing to recognize that it presents a

problem, and demands a hitherto neglected acknowledgement of escha-

tology in Jesus' thought, and quite another to use it for a clue

out of which to spin a whole new explanation of His life. The lat­

ter method belongs rather to the field of detective fiction than to

scholarly historical research.

Moreover, this predilection for mysteries and ingenious solu­

tions is hardly justifiable in one who writes with such scorn of the

1. The statement in Mark 13.32: "But of that day and hour no one knows, not the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father", cannot be used against Schweitzer in this connection for two reasons: (l) it is found in Mark 13, the "Synoptic apocalypse" which Schweitzer, along with many other scholars, considers doubtful: "Even though it may contain single eschatological sayings attributable to Jesus, the dis­ course as such is necessarily unhistorical. It betrays the perspec­ tive of the time after Jesus' death." (Sketch, p.246). (it is ironi­ cal to note that Schweitzer, the champion of "thoroughgoing" escha- tology, finds it necessary to reject the most eschatological passage in the gospels 1.); and (2) even if this particular saying is genuine, it was uttered much later, after Jesus' disappointment about the non- appearance of the Kingdom, which we are here discussing, and so may reflect His disappointment on that occasion, and greater caution be­ cause of it. Schweitzer frequently finds such a cautious attitude in Jesus 1 later sayings. Cf. also the suggestion about the omnipo­ tence of God, to which all eschatological details are subject, above pp. 126-127.

**/ /

136

"special knowledge" of the writers of the "liberal" lives. For in­

stance:

"Schenkel is able to give these explanations because he knows the most secret thoughts of Jesus and is therefore no longer bound to the text."!

"Although Mark never allows a single word to escape him about the motives of the northern ftourneys, Weiss is so clever at reading between the lines that the motives are Spiite suf­ ficiently' clear to him."^

"It was doubtless from the same Drivate source of infor­ mation that the author derived his knowledge regarding the gradual development of the thought of the Passion in the consciousness of Jesus."^

To be sure, Schweitzer does take|eare to read the lines before he

starts filling in between them. But his assumptions are none the

less daring because for modern psychology, which was unknown in the

ancient world, he substitutes a conception of Jesus' eschatology

which is difficult to understand at the present day.

This is quite clear in his summary of the Mystery of the King­

dom of God:

"The secret of the Kingdom of God which Jesus unveils in the parables about confident expectation in Mark 4, and declares in so many words in the eulogy on the Baptist (Matt.11), a- mounts to this, that in the movement to which the J&aptist gave the first impulse, and which still continued, there was an initial fact which was drawing after it the coming of the Kingdom, in a fashion which was miraculous, unintelligible, but unfailingly certain, since the sufficient cause for it lay in the nower and purpose of uod. .... If this genu­ inely 'historical 1 interpretation o p the mystery of the Kingdom of God is correct, Jesus must have expected the com­ ing of the Kingdom at harvest time."^

Just to state it in this fashion is to show that Schweitzer, too,

1. Quest, p. 206.

2. ibid., p. 217.

3. ibid., p. 293.

4. ibid., p. 356.

137

is reading between the lines, and with as little warrant. Even if

his interpretation of the parables is Correct in its general import

(as Otto agrees) , that does not guarantee the specific interpreta­

tion that Jesus expected the Kingdom at harvest time.

On this precarious foundation Schweitzer builds his explanation

of Jesus' behaviour agter the return of the twelve. Of 0. Holtzmann's

insistence that others besides the twelve went with Jesus into "exile"

in the north, Schweitzer acidly remarked:

"The value which this special knowledge, independent of the text, has for the author, becomes evident a little farther on. After Peter's confession, Jesus calls the 'multitude 1 to Hira (Mark £.34), and speaks to them of His sufferings and of tak­ ing up the cross and following Him. .... The knowledge drawn from outside the text is therefore required to solve a difficulty in the text."2

In the first place, Schweitzer's charge in this instance is quite un­

fair. Holtzmann is here making a perfectly natural inference, not,

be it noted, "from outside the text", but from Mark £.34, which stands

in Mark in the midst of the passage about which he is writing. The

"difficulty in the text" is apparent only to one who realizes what a

problem it presents to Schweitzer's own interpretation of the passage

in question. We shall see presently that Schweitzer's own solution

of this particular"difficulty" is much more complicated and does vio-*

lence to the text as well. In the second place, Schweitzer feels

hvnself quite justified ^n postulating that Jesus expected the King­

dom to come at a given time on just such slender evidence - the one

solid verse (Matt,10.23) plus several doubtful ones, because it ex­

plains to him why Jesus "fled" from the same multitude of which

1. See The Kingdom of uod and the son of Man, pp.llAff.

2. Quest, p. 297.

138

Holtzmann was writing in this passage in question, after the return

of the twelve. In his case, mueh more than in Holtzmann's "the knowl-

^edge drawn from outside the text is required to solve a difficulty",

not this time "in the text", but about the turning-point of the life

of Jesus. For it is Schweitzer's contention that Jesus never ex­

pected the twelve to return from their mission, vi/hen they did, and

still the Kingdom did not come, He wanted to get away from this em­

barrassing "multitude" and find solitude to think and pray through

the difficulty. At first he tried to escape by ship across the sea

of Ualilee ( T!ark 6.30-32), but the multitude followed on foot along

the shore. So then he retired further northward beyond the borders

of Ualilee (Mark 7.21). The solution at which He finally arrived

is the Mystery of the Passion. But this Mystery of the Passion is

the third of Schweitzer's mysteries. Before we can fully understand

it, we must matter the second, the Mystery of the Messiahship, which

he introduces abruptly at this point in the Sketch.-'-

b. The Mystery of the Messiahship.

rhis Mystery of the Messiahship p-oes back ultinnately, as did

that of the Kingdom of God, to that occasion when, during his mili­

tary training, schweitzer found himself confronted with the tenth

and eleventh chapters of Matthew. John the Baptist had sent mes­

sengers to Jesus, asking, "Art thou the ooming O^e, or do we look

for another?" and oesus, instead of answering Yes or No, Dointed to

the activities in which He was engaged, in fulfillment of prophecy.

Why this evasive answer? Schweitzer replies:

1. See Sketch, pp.126-12?.

139

"because He was not yet ready to make public Whom He believed Himself to be."1

Schweitzer finds himself driven to tH s no35.tion by a whole series

of facts. One is that notiody seems to suspect that Jesus is the Mes-

sian.

"One thing is certain: up to the time of the mission of the twelve no bne had the faintest idea of recognizing in Him the Messiah. At Caesarea "Philippi the disciples could only reply that the peoole took Him for a prophet or for Elijah the Forerunner, and they themselves knew no better, for Pe­ ter, as Jesus Himself said, did not derive his knowledge fron the Master's ministry in work and word, but owed it to a supernatural revelation."2

Another is that, even at Jesus' trial, none of His accusers knows

of His Messianic pretensions.

"The bribed witnesses know nothing of the sort to allege. What is remarkable in their evidence - upon which too little weight has been laid - consists precisely in the fact that they in no wise charge Him with wishing to be the Messiah. For them this impious pretension exhausts itself in a dis­ respectful word about the temple. Let one picture to him­ self what the procedure of the trial would have been if the hired accusers had of themselves discovered Messianic hints in Jesus' speechesl'"^

He is only condemned to death when He Himself admits such preten­

sions:

"The High Priest put to Him the question, whether He were the Messiah. Therefore he knew of Jesus' claims."^

Schweitzer summarizes the facts as he sees them as follows;

"The experience at the Baptism signified the inception of Jesus' Messianic consciousness. In the neighbourhood of uaesarea Philippi He revealed His secret to His disciples. It was before the High Priest that He first openly made pro-*

1. My Life and Thought, p. 19.

2. Sketch, pp.127-128.

3. sketch, pp. 131-132.

4. ibid., p. 132.

140

fession of His Messianic office. Therefore the Messianic con­ sciousness underlay all the while His preaching of the Kingdom of u-od. But He does not assume on the part of nis hearers any Ipiowledge of the position which belonged to Him. The faith which He required had nothing to do with His person, but it was due only to the message of the nearness of the Kingdom. It was the Fourth Evangelist who first presented the history of Jesus as if it concerned itself chiefly with His personality."!

But hw is also aware that a great many problems are raised by this

theory:

"The problem of Jesus' Messiahship in all its difficulty may be formulated as follows: How was it possible that Jesus knew Himself as the Messiah from the beginning, and yet to the very last moment dtifl not give in His public preaching any in­ timation of His Messiahship? How could it in the long run re­ main hidden from the people that these speeches were uttered out of a Messianic consciousness? Jesus was a Messiah who during His public ministry would not be one, did not need to tie, and might not be, for the sake of fulfilling His mission! It is thus that history puts the problem?"^

But if Jesus did not let the peoDle in on His secret, then who

did they take Him for? This is the first problem. Here again Cae-

sarea Philippi provides the answer. Jesus asked first: "Who do men

say that I am?" and they replied: "John the Baptist", or "Elijah",

or "one of the prophets" (Mark 8.27-280. No one took Him for the

future Messiah.

"Conjectures of that sort were rendered completely im­ possible by the way in which Jesus spoke of the Messiah in tbe iftiird person and as a character of the future. He inti­ mated to the disciples as He sent them upon their mission that the Son of Man would appear before they had gone through all the cities of Israel (Matt.10.23). In Mark B.38 He gave promise to the people of the speedy appearing of the Son of Man for judgment and the coming of the Kingdom of God with power. In the same way at Jerusalem He still spoke of the judgment which the Son of Man will hold when He appears in His glory surrounded by the angels (Matt.25.31) "

1. Sketch, p. 127.

2. $bid., pp.134-135.

3. ibid., p. 136.

141

To be sure, in order to follow this through, Schweitzer has to dis­

credit three groups of passages: (1) four Matthew passages in which

Jesus is called Son of David or Son of God, which are dismissed as

"peculiar to Tfetthew and belong(ing) to a secondary literary stratum" 1 ; >

(2) three Mark passages in which demons call Him the Son of God,

which are passed off with the words:

"Who believed the devil and the wild speech of the possessed?"2 ;

(3) those "Son of Man" passages where Jesus is reported to use the

expression as a substitute for "I", of which six, from Matthew, are

branded "secondary"^, while two, in Mark, demand reinterpretation.k

Here history (that is, what corresponds to Schweitzer's conception

of it) becomes the decisive factor in solving literary questions:

"AH those passages are historical which show the influence of the apocalyptic reference to the Son of Man in Daniel; all arc unhistorical in which such is not the case."5

In this he is indulging in a practice he condemned in von Soden:

"But why should whatever is incomprehensible to us be un­ historical? Mould it not be better simply to admit that we do not understand certain connections of ideas and turns of expression in the discourses of Jesus?" 6

On the other hand, certain "Son of Man" sayings relating moat nat-

1. Sketch, p. 129.

2. ibid., p. 130.

3. ibid., pp.194-197.

4. ibid., pp.198-199.

5. ibid., p. 199.

6. Quest, p. 304. Yet in this particular instance, Schweitzer has the corroboration of E. F. Scott (The Kingdom and the Messiah, pp. 192-195), and R. Otto (The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, pp. 233-234), although W. Manson (Jesus the Messiah, pp.I63ff.) doubt s that all of them can be so easily disposed of.

142

urally to Jesus are taken b? Schweitzer to be instances of His Mes­

sianic secret shining through.

"Before the people Jesus merely suggested the absolute solid­ arity between Himself and the Son of Man whom He proclaimed."^-

This, he thinks, is what led people to think of Him as Elijah.

"Such importance as Jesus claimed for Himself belonged to only one personality, - Elijah, the mighty Forerunner, - for his manifestation stretched out of the present into the Messianic aeon and bound both together. Hence the people held that Jesus was Elijah. In this was expressed the high­ est estimate which Jesus' personality could wring from the masses. In this case it is not a question of one of the customary misunderstandings so beloved of the secondary gospel narrators, but the people could not, from Jesus' ap­ pearance and proclamation, come to any other conclusion about Him."2

This last statement ignores the fact that Mark 8.28 indicates others

for whom the people did take Him. Nor is Schweitzer able to docu­

ment his assertion that signs and wonders were expected of Elijah,

ffe attempts to do this by equating Malachi 4.5, which prophesied the

return of Elijah, with Joel 2.31, which describes signs of the end,

on the basis of the common phrase

"before the coming of the great and terrible Day of the Lord."-?

But even granting the coincidence of Elijah and the signs of the end

does not prove that Elijah must have produced them. On the contrary,

it is the Lord who will produce the signs of Joel 2, although this

passage does not, of course, preclude His use of a human agent.

Efren John the Baptist is supposed to recognize Jesus as Elijahs

"Art thou the Coming One? asked the Baptist. Jesus replied? If ye are willing to receive it, he himself is Elijah, the

1. sketch, p. 136.

2. ibid., pp.138-139.

3. ibid., p. 141-

143

Coming One! The designation of the 'Coming One' is therefore common to both speeches."^

and so another coincidence of language is made the basis of this con­

tention.

At first, it is hard to see why Schweitzer should be so insisb-

jtent on this identification of Jesus with Elijah, except perhaps to

counteract the usual interpretation of John 1 s question as referring

to the Messiah. The real season becomes clear however when we reach

the Triumphal Entry. There,according to Mark, Jesus is acclaimed

in the words of Psalm 118.25;

"In Mark we have two clearly distinguishable acclamations. The first is directed to the person of Jesus in their midst i Hosannal Blessed be "the Coming One" in the name of the Lord" (Mark 11.9) The second refers to the expected coming of the Kingdom: 'Blessed be the coming Kingdom of our father David. Hosanna in the highest I' The Son of David is thus not mentioned at all."2

The fact that Matthew includes a "Hosanna to the Son of David" just

goes to show how mixed up he has become,

"The secondary character of the account in Matthew is evi­ dent in the fact that it applies to the Son of David and to the (Joming One not only an Hosanna but likewise an Hosanna in the highest, - whereby the Messiah is first assumed to be on earth and then, still in heaven."^

Likewise, the Matthean and Lucan accounts of the healing of Barti-

maeus have to be discarded because they too contain the words "Son

of David", whereas Mark's record fives a much more credible (that

is, less legendary) account, and in it the offending words can be

explained away. 4-

1. sketch, p. 149,

2. Sbid., pp.156-157.

3. ibid., p. 158.

4. ibid., pp.159-160.

But this Mystery of the Messiahship involves a still greater

violence to the text in order, first, to resolve the doublet of the

miraculous feeding, and then, to transpose the Transfiguration to a

place before Peter 1 s confession. This is quite a complicated man­

oeuvre. It starts with two parallel series of events:

Two feedings of a multitudefollowed by two voyages Mark 6.31-56 and £.1-22

Two encounters with Pharisees 7. 1-23 and 8.11-13 Two journeys northward 7.23-30 and 8.27 Two returns to Galilee 7.31 and 9.30-33. •L

This is indeed a remarkable series of parallels, especially if,

like Schweitzer, one concentrates on the similarities of outline

and overlooks the differences, especially of detail, of which there

are many. Kor it is only by minimizing and ignoring these latter

that he could possibly reach the conclusion:

"We have here therefore two independent accounts of the same epoch in Jesus'syLife. In their plan they match one another perfectly, differing only in the choice of events to be re­ lated. These two narrative series are as it were predesti­ nated to be united instead of being jblaced side by side."^

Strange that no one before had ever felt called ut>on to perform the

marriageI

Later on, Schweitzer finds himself compelled to admit that

"The second cycle is incomplete and fallen somewhat into dis-

1. Sketch, pp.165-166. If Schweitzer had really been "thoroughgoing", he could have discovered seven parallels instead of four:

Two feedings of a multitude Mark 6.34-44 and 8.1-9 followed by two voyages 6.45-56 and 8.10

Two encounters with Pharisees 7- 1-13 and 8.11-13 and two denunciations of them 7.14-23 and 8.14-21

TWO journeys northward 7.24 and 8.27and two exorcisms 7.25-30 and 9-14-27

Two returns to Galiiee 7.31 and 9.30-33,

2. Sketch, pp.165-166.

145

order. "--

for it is only by rearranging the second cycle that the details can

be brought into even approximate harmony with the first, to say no­

thing of "hSatching perfectly", as he had claimed. Yet he dares go

on:

"Therewith the parallelism of the two series is proven."2

It would be more accurate to say it had been engineered.

But we are not through yet. The above only serves to elimin­

ate the second feeding. There is still the matter of the "multi­

tude" about which he disagreed so violently with Holtzmann.^ Here

the remarkable feature is that on some occasions,supposedly in the

region of uaesarea Philippi, Jesus is with the disciples (Mark 8.

27-33), at others in the same context with the three only (Mark 9-

2-13), at still others, with no change of locality indicated, the

whole multitude is present (Mark 8.34-9.1 and 9-14-29).

"But it is not only the multitude that appears unexpectedly: the whole scenery also is altered. One finds oneself in a familiar region, for Jesus enters with His disciples 'into the house', while the people stay without (Mark 9.23)l"^

This, Schweitzer thinks, means that Mark 8.34-9.29

"cannot have been enacted in heathen territory, but only in Galileel"?

And because in Mark 9.30 He is represented as passing through uali-

1. Sketch, p. 167.

2. Sketch, p. 168.

3. See above, p. 137,

4» Sketch, p. 175. Were there then no houses in Uaesarea Philippi where Jesus might have gone with the twelve?

5. Sketch, pp.175-176. uf. Quest, p. 381.

146

lee incognito, this section

"belongs in the Galilean period before the departure for the north, and more precisely, at the time of the return of the disciples, for it is then that He was constantly surrounded by a. throng of people and was seeking to be in solitude with His disciples 1." 1

This has the effect of placing Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi

after the Transfiguration, where it must stand in order to be intelli­

gible (to his theory).

For in Schweitzer's view, Jesus never willingly revealed His Mes-

siahship. He Himself leanned of it at the Baptism. Peter, Jarnes and

John learned of it by accident, at the Transfiguration, which was

some kind of ecstatic experience due to their intense expectation of

the immediate coining of the Kingdom.^ At Caesarea Philippi, although

Jesus had solemnly charged the three to tell it*to no man (Mark 9-9),

Peter revealed to the twelve this secret which "flesh and blood had

not revealed to him" (Matt.16.17). Later on, Judas betrayed this se­

cret to the High Priest who could not prove it against Jesus at the

trial because he had no witnesses,

"To be Elijah, the prophet of the last times, was no religious crime. But to claim to be the Messiah, that was blasphemy! The perfidy of the charge lay in the High Priest's insinuation that Jesus held Himself then to be the Messiah, just as He

^ stood there before Him. This Jesus repudiated with a proud word about His coming as Son of Man. Nevertheless He was con­ demned for blasphemy."-'

It thus appears that whatever advantages this theory of the Mys­

tery of the ^essiahship may afford, in the way of making certain scenes

1. Sketch, p. 1?6. To Schweitzer, apparently, the disciples are al­ ways synonymous with the twelve.

2. Sketch, pp.181-182, or Quest, pp.383-384. It appears that Schweitzer is also capable of psychologizing at the right moments.

3. sketch, p. 217.

and events in the life of Jesus more "historically" probable, the

theory itself rests on very questionable foundations. But on the

whole, it is not a necessary part of the eschat©logical interpreta­

tion of the life of Jesus. That is, the recognition of an eschato-

logical cast of thought in Jesus does not require acceptance of this

"Mystery", nor does it depend upon it s as is evident from the fact

that most writers who take Account of Jesus' eschatology never even

mention the idea of a Messianic "secret".

g# The Ifystery of the Passion.

We now return to the Mystery of the Passion - the third of the

"mysteries" by which Schweitzer seeks to explain the life of Jesus.

"In the secret of His Passion which Jesus reveals to the dis­ ciples at Caesarea Philippi the pre-Messianic tribulation is for others set aside, abolished, concentrated ut>on Himself a- lone, and that in the form that they are fulfilled in His own Passion and death at Jerusalem. That was the new conviction that had dawned upon Him. He must suffer for others.....that the Kingdom might come." 2

Just when Jesus arrived at this conclusion is not clear. If Schweit­

zer had been willing to credit Luke with any historical value, he

might have made this revelation a part of the ecstatic experience of

the Transfiguration, for Luke records:

"And behold two men whre talking with Him who were Moses and Elijah, who appearing in glory spoke of the departure He was about to fulfill in Jerusalem."3

1. Otto is the only one who does mention it: "But fclithough He Himself was the future Son of Man, He did not proclaim Himself as the Son of Man. It was God and not Himself who revealed the Son of Man as such" through the signs and wonders He performed. (The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, p. 219). Wrede, and Dibelius after him, think of the Messianic secret as an invention of Mark. Scott and Manson see in the gradual revelation of the Messiahship evidence of a developHMlrti of Je­ sus' self-consciousness.

2. Quest, pp.396-387. 3. Luke 9-30-31,

148

Schweitz«r had traced the Mystery of the MessiaHship to a similar ec­

static experience at the Baptism. As it is, he locates the new Mys­

tery of the Passion at just about the time of the Transfiguration.

For he finds the last expression of anticipation of the general af­

flictions in Mark 8.35-38, which, it will be remembered, is just be­

fore the Transfiguration. The first expression of the new attitude

he finds in Mark 8.2?-33, at Caesarea Philippi, which, as we have

seen, he places after the Transfiguration.

"With the revelation at Caesarea Philippi cease all intimations that the believers must pass w:; th Jesus through the Affliction. "^

Indeed, the saying about Elijah on the way down from the mount of

Transfiguration seems to point in this direction:

"How much He was preoccupied with the thought of the Bap­ tist's death is shown by the conversation which followed the revelation to the three on the mountain. It was ordained in the Scripture that Elijah must meet such a fate at the hands of men. So also it is written of the Son of Man that He must suffer many things and be set at naught (Mark 9.12-13)."3

This would seem to narrow down the inception of the new Mystery of

the Passion to the six days mentioned in Mark 9.2, including the

Transfiguration which they introduce. But perhaps Schweitzer's re­

luctance to locate the revelation thus definitely at the time of the

Transfiguration is that it would make the subsequent "flight" to the

north inexplicable, since Jesus would already know the new mystery,

according to Schweitzer's chronology, before starting north. It does

not seem to oecur to him that, just as the forty days of solitude in

the wilderness followed the disclosure of His Messiahship at the Bap-

1. See Sketch, pp.181-182.

2. ibid., pp.230-231,

3. ibid., p. 233.

149

tism, so Jesus would need further time to think through the implica­

tions of this new ecstatic revelation, and the "flight" to the north

would give Him that time. However, it is not the purpose of this the­

sis to impDDve on Schweitzer 1 s theory, but to evaluate it.

And how did Jesus learn this new Mystery?

"The delay of the eschatologieal coming of the Kingdom, - that was the great fact which drove Jesus at that time once and a- gain into solitude to seek light upon the mystery.

"Before the Kingdom could come the Affliction must arrive. But it failed to arrive. It must be brought about in order that the Kingdom may thus be constrained to come. Kepentance and the subjugation of the power of ungodliness did not avail by themselves; but the violent stormers of the Kingdom must be reinforced by one stronger still, the future Messiah, who brings down upon Himself the final Affliction in the form in which it had already been accomplished upon Elijah. Thus the secret of the Kingdom merges in the secret of the Passion."1

Moreover, He thinks of the final Affliction in terms of atonement and

purification:

"But now God does not bring the Affliction to pass. And yet the atonement must be made. Then it occurred to Jesus that He as the coining Son of Man must accomplish the atonement in His own person."2

Here we have Schweitzer's remarkably simple and effective theory of

the atonement,

"That is the secret of the Passion. Jesus did actually die for the sinel of men, even though it was in another sense thafc that which Anselm's theory assumes."3

"This thought Jesus found in the prophecies of Isaiah, which spoke of the suffering Servant of the Lord."4-

Of course, this source had already been suggested by Weisee^, and

1. Sketch, p. 234,

2. ibid., p. 235.

3. ibid., pp.235-236.

4. Quest, p. 3BB.

5. see Quest, p. 132.

150

Strauss3-, and even traced to Rabbinical confirmation by Ghillany2 .

Schweitzer, however, makes a point of emphasizing the eschatological

character of the whole of Deufcero-Isaiah (ch.40-66), commencing

"with the proclamation that God's reign is about to begin", followed

by the presentation of the righteous elect, upon whom "God has put

His Spirit" (lsa.42.lff), and "the delineation of the suffering of

the Servant of God" (Isa.49.Iff;52.Iff;53.1ff) "there follows a des­

cription of the Judgment upon the whole world and upon Israel" (Isa.

54-65), and consummated with the "glory of God.... enthroned above

the new heaven and the new earth" (Isa.65-66) 4 3

"And since He found it there set down that He must suffer unrecognized, and that those for whom He suffered should doubt Him, His suffering should, nay must, remain a mystery."^-

It involved a serious offenee, because the Apostles, as well as the

people generally, were expecting the future victorious Son of Man.

"They, on their part, are thinking only of the coming trans­ formation of all things, as their conversation shows. The prospect which He has opened up to them is clear enough; the only thing that they doA understand is why He must first die at Jerusalem. The first time Ehat Peter ventured to speak to Him about it, He had turned on him with a cruel harshness, had almost cursed him (Mark 8.32-33); from that time forward they no longer dared to ask Him anything about it."5

So Jesus goes to Jerusalem to face death, indeed to provoke the

authorities to put Him to death.

"That is why He violently cleanses the Temple, and attacks the

1. See Quest, p. 198.

2. See Quest, p. 168.

3. see Sketch, pp.236-238.

4* Quest, p. 388.

5. ibid., p. 389.

151

Pharisees, in the presence of the people, with passionate in­ vective."!

Thus He expects to compel the coming of the Kingdom, of which He ex­

pects to be the Messiah. This is a bold reading of the gospel rec­

ords. For they do not tell us that Jesus tried to provoke His death,

but only that He foresaw its necessity, and submitted to it. Indeed,

the prayer in Gethsemane sounds like a last desperate attempt to es­

cape its necessity. Nevertheless, in contrast with the other two

"%-steries", this one is not only ingenious - it is an at least pos­

sible reading of the recorded facts. 1-b involves less reading be­

tween the lines - for what the disciples did not understand before

Jesus' death, the doctrine of the atonement, became the chief subject

of their preaching afterwards. It also involves no violence to the

text. But it shares one obvious defect with the Mystery of the King­

dom of God, on which it is based: The Kingdom did not come in apoca­

lyptic form at the time of the Resurrection any more than it did at

the time of the harvest, and so, although Schweitzer carefully re­

frains from saying so, according to his theory Jesus died in vain.

That He rose from the dead individually, that His followers founded

the church trhich bears His name, that He Himself lives in the lives

of true Christians - all these, wonderful as they are, do not fulfill

the purpose for which He died, if Schweitzer ife right.

And so we must take up again, and settle conclusively, if pos­

sible, this point which has been pressing for discussion all through

this thesis: the problem of Jesus' alleged mistakes, which figure

so largely in Schweitzer's interpretation. They present us with a

1. Quest, p. 3S9.

152

dilemma of the kind Schweitzer loves. One horn we have already hinted

at in a previous connection: if Jesus was mistaken about the time and

manner of the coming of the Kingdom, which occupies such a central and

,?ll-important place in His expectations, according to Schweitzer, we

have no guarantee that He was correct about any other part of the truth

of God. In particular, we have no assurance that He was right about

being the Messiah-to-be. He may have been just as much mistaken about

this "Mystery" as He was proved to be about the other two. Schweitzer

believes that this %stery was disclosed to Him in the ecstatic expe­

rience following the Baptism. But ecstatic experiences are notoriously

easy to misinterpret. Yet if He was not the Messiah-to-be, then He

loses a great deal of His authority for us, for then He was just what

the people took Him for - a wandering prophet or teacher, and a mis­

taken one at that - and Schweitzer's claim to rescue Him from the hu-

manizers and to restore His heroic greataess is proven faise: on the

contrary, he has reduced it still further. Moreover, Jesus may also

have been mistaken about the atoning value of His Passion. He cer­

tainly was wrong, if Schweitzer is right, about expecting His death

to bring in the Kingdom without the tribulation. He may also have

been wrong about His life being a ransom for the guilt of sin, and in

that case, we have no warrant to expect salvation, or even forgiveness

of sins, through Him. In sum, if Schweitzer is right about Jesus' es-

chatological conception of His mission, then the religion of Jesus has

no sure claim upon any one. That is one horn of the dilemma.

But Schweitzer seeks to avoid it by showing how "Chsistianit^"

developed out of the failure of Jesus' expectations. He writes:

"While Jesus' Secret brought His death and the dawning of

153

the Kingdom into the closest temporal and causal connection,

for the primitive Church, on the other hand, a past event, as such, constituted the object to be explained, since the King­

dom had not arrived and the original causal connection was

dissolved along with the temporal."1

He goes on further:

"The abolition of the causal connection between the death of

Jesus and the realisation of the Kingdom was fatal to the early

uhristian eschatology."2

This leads him finally to conclude:

"In the fact that subsequent history compulsorily created in

the church an uneschatological view of the world, it only ac­ complished what in the nature of things was already determined

by Jesus' death."The death of Jesus the end of eschatology'. The Messiah

who upon earth was not such - the end of the Messianic expecta­

tion'. The view of the world in which Jesus lived and preached

was eschatological: the 'Christian view of the world 1 which He

founded by His death carries mankind forever beyond eschatology 1.

That is the great secret of the Christian 'scheme of salvation.'"3

This is the climax toward which the whole argument of the Sketch has

been working. It will readily be seen that, as in the Quest, it puts

Christianity in the paradoxical position of being founded by the "his­

torical Jesus" and yet independent of all the great aims and purposes

for which He lived and died'. Thus, like Schleiermacher, who concealed

the offence of His observations about the Lord's Supper^, and the

rationalism of his Life of Jesus-*, beneath his brilliant dialectic,

so Schweitzer seeks to overcome the difficulty of his mistaken Jesus.

But in doing so, he comes down squarely on the other horn of the di­

lemma. In an unguarded sentence earlier in the above closing diseus-

1. Sketch, pp.242-243,

2. ibid., p. 245.

3. ibid., pp.247-248.

4. See Das Abendmahlsproblem, pp.vi-vii.

5. See Quest, p. 200.

154

sion, he had spoken of

"the necessary distortion which Jesus' idea ofl the Passion un­ derwent in the Primitive Church." 1

According to his view, that is just what primitive Christianity, and

indeed all Christianity is: a distortion of the truth as Jesus under­

stood it. But how can a distortion have any claim upon us either?

For if Jesus was right, then the early Church was wrong, and we have

been wrong to follow in its footsteps. If Jesus was wrong, that

still does not make the early Church right, and therefore we are

still worse off. Thus it would appear that Christianity has no right

to the name of Christianity at all, but should be called "Petrinity"

or "Paulinity" or "Johanninity" according to the interpretation fol­

lowed. This Schweitzer is forced by his own theory to give up not

only the historical Jesus, but also historical Christianity,

To escape this dilemma, he has to give up completely any hope

of truth in Jesus' Wclfeanschauung, and make our relationship to Him

entirely a matter of the will:

"Knowledge of spiritual truth is not called jtpon to Drove its genuineness by showing further knowledge about the events of world-history and matters of ordinary life. Its province lies on a quite different level from the latter ! s, and it is quite independent of it.

"The historical Jesus moves Us deeply by His subordination to God."2

Or, expressed in more philosepical terms;

"Das letzte und tiefste Wissen von den Dingen kommt aus dem Willen. Darum wird das Denken, das die letzten Synthesen der Beobachtungen und Erkenntnisse zu ziehen sucht, urn zu einer Weltanschauung zu gelangen, in seiner Richtung durch den Willen bestimmt, der das primare und weiter nicht erklar- liche Wesen der betreffenden Persftnlichkeiten und Zeiten aus- macht. " *

1. Sketch, pp. 244-245. 3. Quest, Ger. ed., p. 636,

2* My Life and Thought, p. 72.

155

Thus, even before Earth, we have Schweitzer foreshadowing the Barth-

ian emphasis on obedience rather than understanding. That art was

sufficient for Schweitzer is proved by his magnificent self-sacri­

fice in later years. But many will find this extreme denial of any

significance to the historical Jesus most unsatisfactory.

There is another way out of this dilemma. And that is to at­

tribute the "mistakes" not to Jesus, but to the author of the eschato-

logical interpretation of His life. For in the last analysis, the

dilemma is based, not on the religion of Jesus, nor even upon the

fact that He thought and expressed Himself in eschatological terms,

but upon Schweitzer's explanation of the history by means of his

three "%steries". They are the sourde of the idea that Jesus was

mistaken about the time and manner of the coming of the Kingdom, and

also of the corollary idea that the faith of the primitive uhurch was

a distortion. Without them or similar leaps of intuition it is quite

possible that the details of the life of JesUs may always be histori­

cally insoluble, but at least the life as a whole will be a strong

enough foundation to support the edifice of Christianity which has

been built upon it.

3. Interim-ethic,

Up to this point we have scarcely mentioned how Schweitzer' s

theory affects his understanding of Jesus' ethical teaching. From

his writings this would seem a relatively unimportant Doint. In the

guest, the subject is only barely mentioned, and then not for its own

sake, but rather in connection with the doctrine of predestination.^

1. See Quest, pp352-353-

156

We might, therefore,have treated it along with the secondary points

towards the end of the first section of this chapter. But it is

really much more important than his treatment would seem to indicate.

He has purposely minimized it, afe the discussion of it in the Sketch

reveals.

The reason he does so is that ethics were all-important to the

"modern-historical" school, whose interpretation he had found so un­

satisfactory. Among their basic assumptions, which he lists only to

refute, he includes:

"3. The conception of the Kingdom of God as a self-ful­ filling ethical society in which service ifi the highest law dominated the idea of the Passion."^

To disprove this, he takes up first Mark.10.41-45 9 the chief passage

on which this assumption is based. It is Jesus' comment to the dis­

ciples on the attempt of the sons of Zebedee to get Him to promise

them the chief seats in the Kingdom. It closes with the words:

"The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to min­ ister, and to give His life a ransom for many."2

On another similar occasion, He had replied with the object-lesson

of the little child:

"Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven."3

new morality of the Kingdom of God which comes into force

The liberals had taken this to mean that

"Self-humiliation and the meekness of service, such ifi the new morality of the Kingdom of God through Jesus' service unto death.

1~. Sketch, p. 63.

2. Mark 10.45.

3. Matthew 18.4.

4. Sketch, pp.33-74-

157

But Schweitzer will have none of this. His thought, dominated as he

claimed Jesus' was, by the idea that the Kingdom is wholly future,

insists

"With this, however, th« fact is ignored that the Kingdom in which one reigns is thought of as a future thing, whereas the service applies to the present!" 1

This is the fundamental thought behind Schweitzer's theory of Jesus'

thics: the completely future and transcendent Kingdom, breaking in

on the present order from without. Therefore ethics, which have to

do with the present age, are uselul only in preparation for the com­

ing Kingdom.

The liberals have been led astray, Schweitzer thinks, by the

Lucan parallel, which has been transferred to the context of the

Last Supper (Luke 28.24-27), and has, in the process^ lost the sense

of distinction between the "now" and "then".

"In the case of the two oldest Synoptists, however, it is not at all a question of the proclamation of the new morality of the Kingdom of God, where serving is ruling; rather it is a question of the significance of humility and service in expec­ tation of the Kingdom of God. Service is the fundamental law of interim-ethicsT"^

Schweitzer minimizes the importance of Jesus' ethics also because

to his mind ethics and eschatology are somehow incompatible;

"The concurrence iiri Jesus of an ethical with an eschatological line of thought has always constituted one of the most diffi­ cult problems of New Testament study. How can two such dif£ ferent views of the world, in part diametrically opposed to one another, be united in one process of thought?"^

1. Sketch, p. 74.

2. ibid., p. 76.

3. ibid., p. 34.

158

In this feeling he is not alone. As he points out, the liberals had

tried to strengthen the ethics either by eliminating or sublimating

the eschatology. He cites Colani and Volkmar as examples of the for­

mer^-, and Haupt as an instance of the latter. And his criticism is f

on the whole, just. But that fact does not justify him in overstating

the opposite tfase as he does:

"The esc hat ©logical thought, if it be taken seriously, abro­ gates the ethical train of thought. It accepts no subordinate place."3

He does not mean, as he seems to do, that Jesus had no ethical mes­

sage, Rather he is thinking of "ethical" as opposed to "eschatologi-

cal", for he gois on:

"Jesus, however, must have thought either eschatologically or uneschatologically, but not both together."^*-

It is this identification of the ethical vrith the "modern" uneschato-

logical view which prompts him to subordinate the ethics of Jesus as

he does*

On the other hand, he considers it a mark of superiority in his

theory that,..while the ethical view of the Kingdom tended to elimi­

nate the eschatology altogether, his eschat©logical view still left

room for the ethics, even though it reduces them in importance.

"In what relation, however, did His ethics and His escha­ tology stand to each other? So long as one starts with the ethics and seeks to comprehend the eschatology as something ad­ ventitious, there appears to be no organic connection between the two, since the ethic of Jesus, as we are accustomed to con-

1. Skttch, p. 84.

2. ibid., p. 85.

3. ibid., p. 86,

4. ibid., p. 86,

159

ceive it, is not in the least accommodated to the eschatology but stands upon a much higher level. One must therefore take the opposite course and see if the ethical proclamation in essence is not conditioned by the eschatological view of the world."1

He now states the case positively:

"If the thought of the eschatological realisation of the King­ dom is the fundamental factor in Jesus' preaching, His whole theory of ethics must come under the conception of repentance as a preparation for the coming of the Kingdom."2

But he makes it clear that he means more by repentance than the word

usually connotes:

"It is a moral renewal in prospect of the accomplishment of universal perfection in the future."-^

It also

''comprises all positive ethical requirements'1^1 ,

and it is

"the lively echo of the 'repentance' of the early prophets, i-'or what Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah mean by repentance is moral renovation in prospect of the Day of the Lord."5

This last phrase, however, is decidedly misleading, for while Amos,

Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah all mention the "Day of the Lord" as a

motive for repentance, their primary interest is in the moral reno­

vation, rather than the eschatological event. The passage which

Schweitzer quotes in support of his statement as typical (Isa.1.16-17)

brings out clearly the need of moral renewal, but does not even men­

tion the Day of the Lord. And in other passages where the Day of

1. Sketch, pp.92-93-

2. ibid., p. 94.

3. ibid., p. 94.

4. ibid., pp.94-95.

5. ibid., p. 95-

160

the Lord is mentioned, as, for instance, in Isaiah

"Behold, the Day of th« Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: He shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it",

it is mentioned as a day of punishment, as a warning to choose right­

eousness in order to escape condemnation. So Schweitzer is right in

saying:

"It is precisely this Old Testament conception of repentance, with its emphasis upon the new moral life, which one must have in mind in order to understand aright the Synoptical repent­ ance. "1

But his implication is wrong when he adds:

"Both have a forward vision, both are dominated by the thought of a condition of perfection which God will bring to pass through the Judga»nt,"2

Even in the apocalyptic period, which Schweitzer does not men­

tion at this point, the shift in emphasis is more apparent than real.

Much greater attention is paid to the details of the rewards of the

righteous and the punishments of the wicked, and in general the pur­

pose ofl apocalyptic is to encourage the righteous to remain stedfast

even in the face of defeat and death, rather than to warn the wicked

of the punishment that awaits them. But even when these flacts are

duly noted, apocalyptic still uses eschatology as a motive for ethi­

cal action.

Schweitzer is right to deal with the ethics of the Sermon on

the Mount as repentance in the prophetic sense. It is, indeed,

"The new morality, which detects the spirit beneath the let­ ter, (and) makes one meet for the Kingdom of God."3

1. Sketch, p. 95.

2. ibid., p. 95-

3. ibid., p. 95.

161

And he is right to find eschatological references in it?

"Only he who has done the will of the heavenly Father can enter into the Kingdom (Mt.7.21). The claim that one is a follower of Jesus, or has even wrought signs and wonders in His name, is of no avail as a substitute for this new righteousness (Mt.7. 22-23). nl

We have already had occasion to note his predestinarian use of the

Beatitudes:

"Blessed are the meek, those that hunger and thirst after Right­ eousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the poor in spirit, those that endure persecution for righteousness' sake, because such character and conduct is their security that with the appearing of the Kingdom of God they will be found to belong to it." 2

Yet 7 after all, there would beally be little point in ffesus' making

these statements unless He hoped thereby to influence His disciples

to seek these virtues. They are not just theological observations,

uttered to satisfy the curiosity of His hearers. They have a defi­

nite ethical purpose, and the eschatology, when it is mentioned, is

introduced as a further motive for obedience to the demands of the

new morality.

The emphasis is different in the parables of the treasure in the

field and the pearl of great price (Mt.13.44-46) which Schweitzer in­

troduces at this point. Here, it should be noted, the primary in­

terest is in eschatology rather than ethics, for these are "parables

of the Kingdom", and not part of the Sermon on the Mount. Schweitzer

thinks they "illustrate the same point"3 because he insists that Je­

sus was thinking primarily of eschatology when He uttered the Sermon^

1. Sketch, p. 96..

2. ibid., pp.96-97.

3. ibid., p. 97*

162

too. That is why he states:

"As repentance unto the Kingdom of God the ethics also of the Sermon on the Mount is interim-ethics."1

This is now the second time that Schweitzer has used this term

"interim-ethics" without defining it. In point of fact he never does

so. Apparently he thinks it is self-explanatory. The translator of

the Quest has paraphrased it as

"the special ethics of the interval before the coming of the Kingdom. "2

And this is a very fair rendering. It reveals why Schweitzer con­

siders the ethics of Jesus relatively unimportant for the under­

standing of the history, for he states that

"the thought of Jesus . . had to do above all with the immedi- ateness of the transition from the condition of moral renewal into the super-moral perfection of the Kingdom of God"3,

where no ethics will be needed.

He seems to be aware that this treataaHh will not be sufficient

for most scholars, for he now proceeds to discuss in detail the con­

trast between "The Ethics of Jesus and Modern Ethics."^ He pays his

respects to "The depth of Jesus' religious ethics"f and avers:

"With reppect to its eternal inward truth it is indeed inde­ pendent of history and unconditioned by it, since it already contains the highest ethical thoughts of all times." 0

This high appraisal explains how Schweitzer can adopt the ethics

of Jesus as his own, and give himself to African medical missions as

1. Sketch, p. 97.

2. Quest, p. 352*

3. Sketch, p. 99- 6. Sketch, p. 99.

4. sketch, p. 99.

5. sketch, p. 99.

163

a Christian service. But he still insists that this thought of "un­

conditional" ethics is modern, and that,

"The ethics of Jesus on the other hand is 'conditional', in the sense that it stands in indissoluble connection with the expectation of a state of perfection which is to be super- naturally brought about."^

The reason for this insistence appears in this sentence:

"If we once perceive the conditional character of Jesus' eth­ ics, and seriously consider its connection with the ethics of the prophets, it is immediately clear that all conceptions of the Kingdom as a growth out of amall beginnings, all no­ tions about an ethics of the Kingdom, or about the develop­ ment of it, have been foisted upon Jesus by our modern con­ sciousness."

Thus it becomes clear that Schweitzer 1 s reason for minimizing the

ethics of Jesus is not any failure to appreciate their intrinsic

value, but the use the "moderns 11 have made o^bhem. For him there

can be no question of achieving the Kingdom in the present world by

ethical behaviour, progressively. There can be no "ethics of the

Kingdom" in that sense.

"For Jesus and the prophets, however, it was a thing impos­ sible. In the immediate ness of their ethical view there is no place for a morality of the Kingdom of God or for a de­ velopment of the Kingdom - it lies beyond the borders of good and evil; it will be brought about by a cosmic catas­ trophe through which evil is to be completely overcome. Hence all moral criteria are to be abolished. The Kingdom of God is super-moral."3

It is really rather remarkable that Schweitzer, at the beginning of

the present century, when faith in inevitable human progress was at

its peak, should have come out so strongly against it. Subsequent

hifetory has proved him right. For Germany, the home of the great

liberal scholars, whose faith in huaan progress was matched by

1. Sketch, p. 100. 2. ibid., p. 101. 3. ibid., pp.101-102.

164

their country's faith in her Kultur, has turned out in two ^'orld tfars

to stand for the opposite of the Christian ethic, and has shown that

automatic human progress, as well as her own national and racial su­

premacy, is just a myth. Schweitzer saw this coming as early as 1S99*

In a remarkable passage in My Life and Thought, he describes how he

first came to the realisation of it. 1 Later it was to drive him to

write his monumental work on the Philosophy of Civilisation (Kultur-

philosophie), the final volume of which is expected to appear this

summer (194#). Certainly no one looking at the state of the world to­

day can continue to believe in the inevitability of human progress,

and h« must needs be indeed a sanguine liberal who can still have

faith in the possibility that h amankind, by sufficient devotion to the

ethics of Jeaus, can produce a "Kingdom of God on earth."i

On the other hand, in his anxiety to state his case, there can be

no doubt that Schwe'fctzer has overstated it. This can be readily seen

from the fact that few subsequent writers, if any, have been willing

to follow him in his description of Jesus' ethics as "interim-ethics" *

He would no doubt ascribe this reluctance to

"a prejudice against this conception of conditional ethics, "^

which he tries to overcome by the assertion that

"It is an unjustified prejudice if it is due to a suspicion that Jesus 1 ethics is thereby disparaged. Exactly the opposite is the case. For this conditionally springs from an absolute ethi­ cal idealism, which postulates for the exp^ected state of per­ fection conditions of existence which are themselves ethical. . . So, to render the fcthics of Jesus unconditional and self-suffic­ ing is not only unhistorical, but it means also the degradation of His ethical idealism. "3

1. My Life and Thought, pp. 172-174.

2. Sketch, p. 103, 3. ibid., p. 103.

165

Yet even Schweitzer confesses to share this "prejudice" at one point:

"If ethics has to do only with the expectation of the super­ natural consummation, its actual worth is diminished, since it is merely individual ethics and i6 concerned only with the re­ lation of each single person to the Kingdom of God. The thought, however, that the moral community which has been constituted by Jesus 1 preaching must be in some way the effective first stage in the realisation of the Kingdom of God - this thought belongs not alone to our ethical sentiment, but it animated also the preaching of Jesus, for He wrought out in strong relief the social character of His ethics. This explains the reluctance one feels to admit that the eschatological idea of the Kingdom of God lay at the basis of Jesus$ preaching from beginning to end, since then one cannot explain how the new moral community which He formed about Himself was in His thought organically connected with the Kingdom which was supernattrally to appear."^-

He favours this "modern line of thought" which is "completely foreign

to Jesus", because

ffEven though He cannot have made use of this explanation of ours, the fact that this new community stands in an organic relation with the final stage was for Him as cettain as for us." 2

What this relation is becomes clear in connection with the Mystery of

the Kingdom of God.

We have already referred in that connection to the use Schweitzer 3

mates of Jesus' saying about forcing the Kingdom (Mt.11.12), Now we

learn that Jesus' ethic of "repentance in expectation of the Kingdom"

is supposed to be even more. According to the secret of the Kingdom

of God

"the moral renewal hastens the supernatural coming of the King­ dom, "b

1. Sketch, pp.103-104.

2. Sketch, pp. 104-105.

3. See above, p. 134.

4. sketch, p. 113.

166

Just as, in the prophets

"Godless behaviour brings nearer the day of Judgment and of con­ demnation",^ so "When they determine to reform their ways, when they seek refuge in Him alone with trusting faith, when Righteousness and truth prevail among them, then will the Lord deliver them from their oppressors, and His glory will be mani­ fest over Israel, to whom the heathen will do service. In that day there will then be peace poured out over the whole world, over nature as well as man."2

This thought became, among the Pharisees, the excuse for legalise.

"Eschatology became a problem of accounting and ethics became casuistry. Jesus, however, reached back after the fundamental conception of the prophetic period, and it is only the form in which He conceives of the emergence of the final event which bears the stamp of later Judaism'13

So Schweitzer sums up:

"The secret of the Kingdom of God is therefore the synthesis effected by a sovereign spirit between the early prophetic ethics and the apocalyptic of the book of Daniel, Hence it is that Jesus' eschatology was rooted in His age and yet stands so high above it. For His contemporaries it was a question of waiting for the Kingdom, of excogitating and depicting every incident of the great catastrophe, and of preparing for the same; while for Jesus it was a question of bringing to pass the expected event through fche moral renovation. Eschatologi- cal ethics is transformed into ethical eschatology."4

In this way, Schweitzer seeks to establish the value of Jesus' teach­

ing which the "interim-ethic" idea might otherwise reduce. Jesus'

hearers, and those of His disciples, are, by their repentance, to be

the "violent" who "wrest the Kingdom unto themselves" (Mt.ll.l2).5

1. Sketch, p. 113. 3« ibid., p. 114.

a. ibid., p. 113, 4. ibid., p. 115.

5. Here Schweitzer seems to forget that in trying to establish the eschatological character of Jesus' charge to the twelve, he had writ­ ten: "The commission, however, is anything but a summary of the 'teach­ ing of Jesus*. It does not in the least contemplate instruction of a thoroughgoing kind, rather what ite in question is a flying proclama­ tion throughout Israel." (sketch, p. 33). But if Jesus Himself had to explain at such length to His disciples the true character of "repentance", how could He expect the untaught repentance of the mul­ titude to have value in forcing the Kingdom? But such small incon­ sistencies are bound to occur in a theory as new and sweeping as his.

"Jesus 1 ethics is modern, not because the eschatology can b« reduced somehow to a mere accompaniment, but precisely because the ethics is absolutely dependent upon this eschatologyl The fact is, this eschatology itself, as it is exhibited in the se­ cret of the Kingdom of God, is thoroughly modern, inasmuch as it is dominated by the thought that the Kingdom of God is to come by reason of the religious-moral renovation which the be­ lievers perform. Every moral-religious performance is there­ fore labour for the coming of the Kingdom of God." 1

Does Schweitzer mean by this that if Christians in our own day would

only repent and live up to Jesus' ethical teachings, the Kingdom of

God would come to us? In that case, we could understand better than

ever why he went to Africa. But this cannot be his meaning, in view

of his insistence on the need in our day for a

"world-view of ethical world- and life-affirmation"

in contrast to the

"world- and life-negation"

of Jesus' eschatology.^ Besides, it would not be logical to suppose

that the Kingdom could now come on such a basis when it failed to do

so for Jesus.

His theory of Jesus' ethical purpose, therefore, comes to grief

on the same difficulty as his theory of the Mysteries: the "repent­

ance" which Jesus sought to inculcate failed to bring about the King­

dom as expected. This means that the value he ascribes to Jesus'

ethics is illusory, and drives him in the end to assert a present

fralue for Jesus'"modern" ethic of love quite independent of its

"historical" (i.e., eschatological) setting.

"So far as its essential spiritual and ethical nature is con-

1. Sketch, p. 122.

2. See My Life and Thought, pp.l?9ff.

168

cerned, Christfciaity' s religious truth remains the same through the centuries. The variations belong only to the outward form which it assumes in the ideas belonging to different world-views. Thus the religion of love which Jesus taught, and which made its first appearance as an element in the late Jewish eschatological world-view, enters later on into connection with the late-Greek, the medieval, and the modern world-views. Nevertheless, it re­ mains through the centuries what it is essentially. Whether it is worked out in terms of one Weltanschauung or another is only a matter of relative important®. What is decisive is the amount of influence over mankind won by the spiritual and ethical truth which it has held from the very first."!

Such rationalisations are typical of the clever complications to

which Schweitzer is forced in his efforts to save his improbable the­

ories. It would have been much simpler for him to give up his insis­

tent desire to solve every problem of the life of Jesus, down to the

least detail. Hor this is the source of all his trouble. Jesus 1N

ethics are alsolute, not in spite of any eschatological expectations

He may have had, as Otto also suggest s^, but because they are the

will of God, as T. W. Mans on suggests:

"His ethics is no mere 'interim-ethic' to bridge the gap between the present and the future: it is the will of God which, whenever and wherever the Kingdom comes, is done on earth as it is in Heaven. "3

This is Bultmann's view, too, although he makes more of the eschatol-

"It is true, however, that Jesus' demands are in one point to be understood in the light of the eschatological message - namely that in them "Now" appears as the decisive hour.

"This leads us to see how truly the eschatological message and the preaching of the will of God are to be comprehended as a unity."7*1

1. My Life and Thought, pp. 67-68.

2. See The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, p. 59.

3. The Mission and Message of Jesus, p. 637.

4. Jesus and the Word. P. 129.

169

This concept of the will of God is really much closer to the pro­

phetic message than that of interim-ethic. Kor while Schweitzer is

right, as Bultmarui agrees, that ethics as such only have value until

the coming of the Kingdom, yet he is not right in suggesting that the

Kingdom abrogates them. On the contrary, the Kingdom of God is the

realm of righteousness, where all behaviour will be in accord with

God's will. Thus the righteousness of the Kingdom includes all the

righteousness of the Law and the Prophets, and all the further right­

eousness of Jesus' ethical teaching, and quite nrobably exceeds even

that lof$y ideal, or at least the best understanding of it that we in

this earthly age are able to achieve. So W. Manson is right when he

insists that

"The eschatologists are wrong, therefore, in their explana­ tion of the uhristian ethic. The moral law of Jesus cannot be regarded as merely preparatory to the Kingdom. Its relation to the Kingdom is much more central and binding, nor is it hard to find. In Matt.6.33, Jesus says, 'Seek ye first the Kingdom (of God) and His righteousness.' He there envisages the true right­ eousness as something flowing from the Kingdom» a life issuing from the new stream of Divine redemptive forces liberated in the Kingdom. Here then we find the principle connecting Christ's ethics with His teaching about the Kingdom.

"The ethic of Jesus is not Interim-Ethic, but the principle which, on the inner side, constitutes the Kingdom."

The most telling argument for the "interim" character of Jesus'

ethical teaching is that it deals with situations which, though real in

this temporary age, are not to be expected in the Kingdom. E. F. Scott

deals with the question from this point of view. He concedes that

"Jasus undoubtedly assumed that many of the conditions for which He legislated would have no Existence in the future age. . . « It would be easy to review the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, one by one, and show that they would be meaningless in a perfect world, such as Jesus contemplated in the near future."2

1. uhrist's View of the Kingdom of God, p. 116.

2. The Kingdom and the Messiah, p. 126.

170

But he rightly observes that

"To regard His ethic as no more than an 'interim morality' is cer­ tainly to misconstrue its whole intention. It needs to be borne in mind that the separate rules and directions which He lays down do not constitute the essence of His teaching. They all run back to the one ultimate demand of inward, spontaneous obedience to the will of God, and are designed to illustrate the working of this new principle. They show how it may be observed in spirit, notwithstanding the untoward conditions of the present age." 1

In fairness to Schweitzer, it should be repeated that he asserts

a greater validity for the ethics of Jesus than many realize. In a

very just appreciation, Principal Selbie wrote in the .Expository Times

"His interpretation of the teaching of Jesus in terms of escha- tology as an interim ethic has failed to command anything- like general assent. At the same time, Schweitzer's position has often been interpreted in a more negative sense than he himself would allow. "2

It might also be pointed out that, since the Kingdom has not yet

we ate still in the period of "interim-ethics", so that Jesus' ethical

teachings are, even on Schweitzer's grounds, still as valid as they

ever were as an ideal for conduct. But without doubt the most impor­

tant argument is Schweitzer's own life. He who considers Jesus' ethic

of love "conditional", and "interim-ethic", has shown bv his sacrificial

sendee what absolute validity it has for him. "By their fruits ye

shall know them."

1. The Kingdom and the Messiah, pp. 126-127. He also tries to prove the absolute character of Jesus' ethical purpose by quoting Mark 13.31: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." This sentence occurs, however, in the "Little Apocalypse" which Schweitzer rejects as of doubtful authenticity.

2. Expository Times, March 1928, p. 257.

171

Chapter Four

CONCLUSION

1. Positive value of Schweitzer's Contribution.

The results of the two preceding chapters have been largely nega­

tive. That was bound to be the case, just as the Quest itself was

largely negative in its results. For it has been our purpose to ex­

amine critically Schweitzer's methods and ideas, rather than to ad­

vance any new constructive theory. But a just appraisal of his con­

tribution must include also the recognition of his positive accom- -

pfehments, for he did have a constructive theory to offer, and, mis­

taken though it may have been in many of its details, it carried

scholarship a long sten forward.

In the first place, Schweitzer's work was salutary in that he

recognized and exposed some of the fallacies of the liberal lives

of Jesus. For this, to be sure, he gave himself full credit, and

he no doubt deserved the sarcasm leveled at him by Lambert in his

review of the two-fold Abendmahl treatise in the Expository Times;

"Lack of confidence in himself and his theories is not one of , his qualities; and it is evident that he firmly believes that

he has got nothing less than what has been called a 'Columbus egg' to lay on the critical table-" 1

He gave him full credit for his originality, but ridiculed

"the Daniel-corae-to-judgment airs with which he treats all previous investigators."^

Yet irritating as Schweitzer's manner undoubtedly is at times, the

fallacies he pointed out are real.

1. Expository Times, June 1902, p. 398.

2. ibid., p. 400.

172

Among these, w« have already had occasion to mention "The Four

Assumptions of the Modern-Historical Solution" with which he dealt at

length in the opening chapter of the Sketch. It will suffice to list

them again here, as he finally corrected them:

11 1. The assumption of a fortunate Galilean period which was fol­lowed by a time of defeat is historically untenable."2. Pauline influence cannot have conditioned the form of earlySynoptic sayings about the Passion."3« Not the ethical but the hyper-ethical, the eschatological,notion of the Kingdom dominates the Passion as Jesus conceived it."4. The utterances of the Passion-idea did not occur in the formof an ethical reflection but it was a question of an incompre­hensible secret which the Bisciples had not the least need tounderstand and in fact did

He also pointed out the arbitrary way in which the liberals

treated the text:

"'It finally comes to this,' says Wrede, 'that each critic re­ tains whatever portion of the traditional sayings can be fitted into his construction of the facts and his conception of his­ torical possibility and rejects the rest.'"^

This was so far-reaching that

"Modern historical theology, therefore, with its three- quarters sceptism, is left at last with anly a torn and tatfc tered Gospel of Mark in its hands. "3

And he was most critical of the supplementary knowledge which the

liberals found it necessary to employ in oirder to make modern sense

out of the ancient events in the life of Jesus.

"We should not, however, regard the evidence of super­ natural knowledge and the self-contradictions of this Life of Jesus as a matter for censure, but rather as a proof of the merits of 0. Holtzmann's work. He has written the last large-

1. Sketch, pp.31-S2.

2. Quest, p. 331.

3. ibid., p. 307-

173

scale Life of Jesus, the only one which the Marcan hypothesis has produced, and aims at providing a scientific basis for the assump­ tions which the general lines of that hypothesis compel him to make; and in this process it becomes clearly apparent that the con­ nection of events can only be carried through at the decisive pas­ sages by violent treatment, or even by rejection of the Marcan text in the interests of the %rcan hypothesis."!

He has especially caustic wortts to level at the liberal practice of

psyc hoiogi zing.

"These ingenious psychologists never seemed to perceive that there is not a word of all this in Mark; but that they had read it all into some of the most contradictory and inexplicable facts in the Gospels, and had thus created a Messiah who both wished to be Mes­ siah and did not wish it, and who in the end, so far as the people were concerned, both was and was not the Messiah. "2

It is a distinct disappointment, therefore, to discover that Schweitzer

should prove guilty of all of these practices when necessary to his own

theory. But at least he has pointed them out as fallacies.

Schweitzer's greatest contribution, however, has been his redis-&

covery and reemphasis of the eschtological elements in the Gospels.A

These were, up to his time, largely neglected, because scholars did

not know how to make use of them. Schweitzer started with them, ac­

cepting them at their face value, and took it for granted that they

meant what they said. Instead of trying to find in Jesus' teachings

what makes sense to us today, he tried to discover what people believed

in Jesus' day, no matter how strange it might seem to us. This was,

in itself, such a sensible procedure that it is quite remarkable it

had not been tried before. For Jesus liveci on earth in a different

part of the world from us, and in a completely different period of the

world's history. He also belonged to a quite different class of soci-

1. Quest, pp.300-301,

2. ibid., p. 220.

174

ety from most of the scholars who seek to recapture Him. Born into a

poor home, He had spent many years as an artisan before becoming an

itinerant preacher and healer. He had probably received the training

of the synagogue school^ but He had never had the leisure to become a

scholar like Gamaliel or Paul, or the German theologians who wrote

Lives of Jesus. There must, therefore, inevitably have been differ­

ences in His point of view from ours. And it should not surprise us,

in consequence, that He should have shared with His contemporaries at

least some of their eschatological views, and frequently made use of

eschatological language in His teaching. At any rate, the Gospels

represent Him to have done so> and we therefore require very good

reasons before we have a right to reject their evidence.

Schweitzer's discussion has also proved suggestive in many of

its details. Lowrie, in the Translator's Introduction to the Sketch,

mentions

"at least eight obscure points which are illuminated for the first time by the eschatological view of the Gospel history.1. Jesus' use of the title 'Son of Man', - commonly in the

third person and with a futuristic sense, as denoting a dignity and power which were not yet His. Jesus was the Messiah des­ ignate.2. The position of John the Baptist: it was Jesus alonw frhat

discovered in him the character of Elijah "the coming One" (cf. Jn.1.21).3. The conception of the Kingdom of God as a gift, to be re­ ceived passively as by a little child - and yet as a thing that 'violent men' must wrest to themselves 'by force 1 .4. The relation of Jesus' Messianic expectation to that which

was current among the people. Jesus moralized the popular eschatological ideal by combining it with the preaching of the prophets. That Jesus opposed a Purely moral ideal to a oopular political agitation is doubly a fiction.5. The significance of the Mission of the Twelve and its con­

nection with the popular excitement which drew five thousand men into the desert bv the seashore.6. The significance of the Transfiguration, coming before the

Confession of Peter, and explaining how the knowledge of Jesus' Messiahship was given by divine revelation.

175

7. The character of the secret which Judas possessed and was in a , position to betray. Our notion that during the last days in Jeru­

salem every one knew of Jesus' claim to be the Christ is plainly contrary to the record. The famous disputes of those days would have taken a very different form if the question which agitated all .ninds was, Is He the Christ? or is He not?8. Jesus' notion of the necessity of His death, His resolution to

die at Jerusalem, and His conception that He was giving His life as «a ransom for many 1 .1

And while we cannot go all the way with Lowrie in his apparent accept­

ance of all eight, as we have indicated in the preceding chapters, it

cannot tie denied that, by bringing them up and causing them to be dis­

cussed, Schweitzer has contributed greatly to our understanding of the

Life of Jesus. As Selbie noted, in his article in the Expository Times,

Schweitzer 1 s work

"greatly stimulated the process of Leben-Jegu-Forschung, and certainly cleared the ground of a good many prepossessions."^

Selbie noted another characteristic of Schweitzer's contribution.

The Quest, he wrote,

"at once made a great stir, not only by the range and trenchancy of its criticism, but bv the originality, and even audacity of its historical reconstruction. It cut clean across the work of the liberal and religious-historical schools, and proceeded to rebuild among the ruins with fresh materials and a new foundation."3

Indeed, much of the value of Schweitzrr's interpretation is due to his

novel approach to a subject of long-standing and universal interest,

and his original treatment of it. This is what makes his books so

fresh and readable. Whether one agrees with him or not, one finds in

his writings nothing hackneyed, nothing boring. One's attention is

riveted, as in a detective mystery, by the expectation of some new and

1. Sketch, pp.35-37.

2. Expository Times, March 1923, p. 257.

3. ibid., p. 257.

176

startling development. And one is not disappointed. Of course, this

feature is also one of Schweitzer's greatest weaknesses - in his de­

sire to present something new, he somfetriimes invents entirely unwar­

ranted theories. We have seen, for instance, how far astray it led

him in connection with his three "Mysteries". There is some truth in

the comment of Vincent Turner, who wrote in the Dublin Review;

"To some extent, no doubt, like so many German scholars (again let us be frank) particularly when they are young - Schweitzer' s theology, remember, is a young man's work - he preferred the pursuit of truth to truth, that is, he preferred the elabora­ tion of a fresh idea; for such people, as Santayana put it, any idea will do as long as it is pregnant with another that may presently take its place. But this is manifestly not a complete explanation."!

Nor is it entirely fair. Schweitzer was prompted not so much by a pas­

sion for novelty as by acute dissatisfaction with the liberal interpre­

tation of the life of Jesus, and a desire to replace it by something

so conclusive that it would destroy it forever. That is why he made

it the aim of the Sketch to restore the heroic greatness of Jesus,2

and why he insisted in seeking truth for its own sake.3 He was hin­

dered in the first of these by the assumption which he held in common

with the liberals that Jesus must be historically explained in purely

human terms. To make Jesus the victim of an obsession, however magni­

ficent, is hardly to magnify Him. And he faited in the second because

of his tendency to mistake ingenuity for truth. Nevertheless, his

reconstruction is built upon a solid foundation of eschatological

1. .Dublin Review, March 1944, p.65. The reference is to Santayana's Egotism in German Philosophy, ch.XII.

2. Sketch, p. 274.

3« In My Life and Thought, p. 65, he quotes II Cor. 13.8: ",Ve can do nothing against the truth, but for the trmth."

177

truth, however ungainly the superstructure. Sufficient evidence of

this is the fact that since the Quest appeared, no thorough scholar

has dared to ignore the eschatological issue, 'tfot all agree with him,

especially in details, and indeed there are some of his more exptrme

points with which none agree. On the other hand, every one must start

with the fact of Jesus' eschatology, however he may explain it. This

is Schweitzer's positive contribution.

And, we might add, it is a most timely contribution. £'or escha­

tology is needed in today 1 s changing world as it was not needed forty

years ago when Schweitzer wrote. The Decay of Civilisation of which

he wrote has not been followed by the necessary Restoration. A new

horde of barbarians is overrunning the civilized world as Sennacherib

and Nebuchadnezzar ov/erran Israel and Judah, as Alexander and Pompey

overran the ancient East, and as Attila and his hosts finally overran

tome. In such circumstances, faith in a Kingdom of God developed by

human effort is not adequate. But now that we can see that humanistic

uhristianity has not proved caoable, we need faith in a Kingdom such

as Jesus expected, as a supernatural gift from God.

2. Summary of results.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer's Eschatological Interpretation of the Life

of Jesus has proved a most interesting study. For one thing, it is the

work of an outstanding uhristian scholar, who is known for his achieve­

ments in four distinct fields: philosophy, theology, music, and medi­

cine, the latter as a missionary to the neglected natives of Africa.

Then, too, it is the work of a comparatively young man, for his first

interest in it was awakened during his first year at the University,

178

and he had brought it to practical completion with the publication of

the -Quest at the age of 31. It is also a -work on a subject of univer­

sal interest, for it deals with the life and work of Him whom millions

recognize as their Saviour and Lord. It is a revolutionary work,

Claiming, with some justice, to discredit a whole school of theologi­

cal interpretation, and turn research into a new direction. It is the

working out of an intriguing hypothesis, that Jesus was dominated by

the eschatological expectations of His time, and that this explains

the problems and riddles of His life. It is a fascinating work to

read, because of the originality of the views expressed, the ingenu­

ity with which problems are attacked, and the remarkable variety and

aptness of the frequent metaphors. It is a work of more than ordinary

power, for Schweitzer writes without any doubts about the consistency

of his logic, or the validity of his theories. He proves a competent

debater, with a gift for discrediting his opponents, and making his

own presentation seem reasonable. It is a controversial work, whose

consequences, such as the idea that Jesus was mistaken, or that His

teachings were "interim-ethics", demand some sort of decision, either

favourable or unfavourable. In all these and other ways, the working

out of this thesis has been most rewarding.

Its results are decidedly mixed, however, varying from complete

agreement at some points to entire disagreement with others, and

reaching definite conclusions in some instances but haying to remain

tentative in others. For this reason it has been impossible to state

the thesis in the form of a simple proposition to be demonstrated and

defended. Rather it has been an exploration to determine how much of

179

the woodland is growing on solid ground, and how much has its roots in

the swamp. The line between the two is very irregular, and at times

almost indistinct. Only when the terrain rises can we be sure it is

solid, and, on the other hand, only where we can actually see water

through the undergrowth can we know for certain that the ground has

given way. The area in between may be perilous, but it may prove

strong enough to bear weight,

a. The Kingdom of God.

The surest point in Schweitzer's view of the life of Jesus is the

fact that we have in the gospel records of unmistakably eschatological

references. They are frequent enough, and well enough attested, to make

it certain that Jesus spoke to His disciples in terms of the esbhato-

logical hopes of the Jewish nation. These took the form of an apocalyp­

tic Kingdom, to be established in the near future, by the supernatural

intervention of God's Messiah. So much is assured.

Not quite so certain it it that Jesus understood these terms in

the very literal way in which Schweitzer interprets them, although it

must be conceded that if they had been used in a consistently figura­

tive sense, some indication of that fact should have survived in the

Synoptic tradition.

Likewise, we dare not categorically assert, as Schweitzer does,

that the Kingdom must be so wholly future and so wholly transcendent

as to preclude any thought of it as presently breaking in, for in that

case, it is hard to understand how the apostles and the early Church

could so quickly accommodate themselves to its failure to appear at

the Resurrection of the Messiah. On the contrary, it seems logical

that if Jesus knew Himself to be the Messiah-to-be, He could see in

180

present events the Kingdoniffto-be. However, in toe absence of conclu­

sive textual evidence one wa^ or the other, and the presence of texts

which would seem to suprort each view, we shall have to leave this

point undecided.

Not so Schweitzer's theory that Jesus expected the Kingdom to

come at any definite time. To be sure, He seems to have expected it

in the very near future. He warned His followers to be always on the

watch for it, and condemned the Pharisees who could not rea.d the signs

of the times. Passages like Matt. 10.23 and /lark 9.1 are troublesome

in their assertion of its early appearance, and must be given due con­

sideration. But the theory that Jesus expected it at harvest-time,

and was thrown into confusion by its failure to appear, as also the

theory that He expected it immediately to follow His death, cannot be

supported by textual evidence, but only by the complicated theoretical

reasoning of Schweitzer's eschatological interpretation. The danger-

signal here Is the complete discredit it casts on Jesus' claim to

knowledge of dod's purposes and His own part in them.

This is all part of Schweitzer's assumption that Jesus was so

dominated by eschatological ideas as to be practically indifferent to

actual history, - that is to say, in less euphemistic terms. He was a

deluded fanatic. That is Schweitzer's idea, not Jesus' as recorded in

the gospels, and as such may be safely rejected, without denying the

truth of the eschatology in general.

b. The Messianic consciousness.

The problem of Jesus' Messianic consciousness is not solved by

Schweitzer. There can be no reasonable doubt that He had one, that

181

for some reason He i/identified Himself v.lth Him WBo Iras'*foretold by

the prophets and who was pictured by the apocalyptic writers as coming

on the clouds of heaven. The fact that Jesus called Himself the Soft

of Man, rather than the Son of David or the Son of God or the Servant

of the Lord, although all these were also Messianic terms, is pretty-

conclusive proof on this point, despite Lietzraann. The fact also

that the disciples called Him the ^hrist although His earthly life

and death gave them little reason to do so, seems to indicate that

they thus understood His claims.

This last fact must^ however, tell against Schweitzer f s insistence

that the Messiahship was considered as wholly future and wholly trans­

cendent. To the disciples, Jesus was Christ by virtue of His death

and resurrection, at least as much as by the expectation that He would

one day return to reign in the still-future Kingdom. To be sure, this

last thought was part of thett belief, but they did not speak of Jesus

as Christ-to-be, or as "Christ" in inverted commas. So while Jesus'

use of the term Son of Man certainly seems to point to the Suture

Kingdom, as Schweitzer claims, it is not impossible for Him to have

included in it some more present meaning of His Messianic consciousness

as well, or for His disciples to have learned it from Him.

How Jesus came to think of Himself as Messiah, Schweitzer cannot

tell us. He falls back on the "ecstatic" experience at the Baptism,

a theory he inherited from his liberal predecessors^ wu o got it from

Mark. This is, indeed, the generally accepted explanation among most

scholars of the "historical" persuasion who refuse to allow the gospel

suggestions of a supernatural origin for it, based either on a miracu­

lous nativity (Matthew and Luke) or a pre-existence of Christ (John).

182

As to how Jesus divulged this "mystery", Schweitzer has a definite

theory, based on phenomena of the gospel record which were under dis-

cmssion at the time he wrote. Jesus does seem to have preferred that

men should discover His Messiahship for themselves, and to have enjoined

secrecy upon those who did discover it, rather than to have laid public

claim to it in the Johannine fashion. On the other hand, to state

categorically, as Schweitzer does, that no man could recognize Him as

the Messiah, because the latter was conceived of in whoily future terms,

is to go beyond the recorded facts. We cannot, to be sure, object to

his placing the Transfiguration before .Caesarea Philippi, because Form

Criticism has taught us to doubt the connection of events in the gos­

pels. But neither can we assert this new order of events which

Schweitzer has worked out.

Schweitzer iis also unnecessarily positive about the idea that the

people all took Jesus for Elijah the Forerunner. The gospels suggest

him as only one possibilitv among several. But we can grant that not

every one, and indeed perhaps not many, recognized Jesus as the Messiah,

even in the last week in Jerusalem.

c. Interim-ethics*

With regard to Schweitzer's theory of "interim-ethics" there is

still less to regard as certain. The discovery that <Iftsus thought in

terms of an apocalyptic Kingdom, to be established in the near future,

by the appearance of the Son of Man upon the clouds of heaven, is

certainly contrary to the idea that humanity, by its own wfforts to

live up to Jesus' ethical teaching^ could expect to produce the King­

dom, as the liberals contended. In this sense, then,, Schweitzer has

183

a right to claim to have upset the liberal view.

On the other hand, the future, supernatural Kingdom of moral per­

fection does not "abrogate" Jesus' ethical teachings. They may no

longer be needed as a guide for conduct in the ideal Kingdom, but that

does not make the principles on which they are founded invalid. On

the contrary, what is righteous in the sight of God for human conduct

in this world.foreshadows, if only inadequately, the righteousness of

the Kingdom of God, in much the same way as Jesus, in the Sermon on

the Mount, did not abrogate the Law and the Prophets, but we,nt beyond

them to a higher standard which included them. Only in this latter

sense is it correct to speak of the Kingdom as "super-moral". It is

therefore misleading and inaccurate to Call Jesus' teaching "interim-

ethics", and to object to the term, "ethics of the Kingdom". On the

contrary, they represent such a high ideal that we can only hope to

achieve the perfection of which they speak in an ideal Kingdom,

Schweitzer comes much nearer the truth when he says Jesus de­

manded "repentance in expectation of the coming of the Kingdom." But

he is going beyond the meaning of his own phrase when he sees in that

"repentance*1 a condition which must be fulfilled in order that the

Kingdom may come, and which in some sense forces its coming.1 This

sense has to be read in from rabbinical sources. Matt. 11.12 is not

sufficient evidence in support of it. "Repentance in expectation of

the Kingdom" should be allowdd to Tiean what it says - Jesus sbught to

inculcate righteousness in His disciples so that they might share in

1. This seems almost like an attempt to vindicate the liberal teaching which he had repudiated, viz., that human ethical effort could bring in the Kingdom. The difference ia in the conception of the Kingdom to be achieved, rather than in the means of achieving it. Many of Schweitzer's severest critics overlook this fact, and condemn him for repudiating Jesus' ethics, a charge of which he is not guilty.

the Kingdom when it came,

d. Other points.

ulosely allied to this thought is Schweitzer 1 s conception of the

atonement - that Jesus by His death expected to force the coming of

the Kingdom at His resurrection. His proof text here is Mark 10.45:

"The Son of Man came ... to give His life a ransom for many." This

atonement theory is one of the simplest and most appealing parts of

Schweitzer 1 s whole eschatological interpretation. Unfortunately, it

depends on the same conception as the idea that the "repentance" of

the disciples could force the Kingdom, and must be rejected on the

same grounds. Or perhaps we should say fortunately, for il Jesus held

this view,, then His death was a failure because it did not bring in

the Kingdom,

The sacraments, tod, are eschatologically interpreted. Baptism

is regarded as John's eschatological sacrament, a "seal" that the re­

cipient will receive the Holy Spirit and escape the judgmnt, and this

be admitted to the Kingdom at its coming. But Schweitzer only mentions

baptism in passing. He regards the Lord's Supper as Jesus 1 sacrament,

end assigns to it much the same significance - by sharing with the Mes­

siah-to-be elements of the Messianic meal-to-be, believers are assured

of a place at the real Messianic banquet in the Kingdom. He points

out that Jesus, as He celebrated it with His disciples, looked forward

to drinking with them again in the Kingdom of God. Paul also mentions

showing the Lord's death "till He come". So Schweitzer is right in

that the sacrament has some eschatological reference. But strangely

enough, although he postulates that Jesus' death was intended to force

the coming of the Kingdom, he insists that the "parables" of the broken

body and the shed blood are only incidental and not the main point of

the celebration. Here he goes beyond the recorded facts in the inter­

ests of his theory, and we need not follow him. The identification

of the feeding of the multitude as another pre-celebration of the Mes­

sianic meal is also possible but very doubtful, in foalue as well as in

truth*

From the above discussion it will appear that there is indeed a

fcernftl of truth in Schweitzer's interpretation - Jesus did expect the

Kingdom to come in an eschatological sense, and He somehow identified

Himself with the coming Messiah. But in order to enforce these facts,

and to bring the record of Jesus' life into harmony with them, he has

felt called upon to make many suppositions and explanations which are

more ingenious than true. His work is chiefly valuable for having

advanced and championed the eschatology of Jesus at a time when it

was in disrepute. And many of his discussions of details are helpful

in that they stimulate fresh thought about them. But he has carried

his interpretation to unwarranted extremes. Probably the best judg^

nient that could be passed on his work is his own verdict on Strauss:

"Who ever discovered a true principle without pressing its application

too far?"l

1. Quest, p. 85.

18'6

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Books by Albert Schweitzer:

a. Music:

Eug&ne Milneh (in French). 28pp, MUlhausen: Brinkmann, 1$98.

J.S.Bach, le musicien-po&te (in French). 455pp.Paris: Costallat; Leipzig: Breitkppf & Hartel, 1905.

J.S.Bach (revised German edition). 344pp.Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1908.

J.S.Bach (Eng.tr.from Ger.ed. by E. Newman). 2 vol.Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1911-

Deutsche und franzosische Orgelbaukunst und Orgelkunst. 5lpp (in Die Musik, parts 13 & 14, 1906)Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1906.

Jubilee edition. 73PP-Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1927.

Internationales Regulativ fur Orgelbau. 47pp.(published by the ofcgan-building section of the International Music Society, of which Schweitzer was a mmrnber) Wien: Artaria, 1909.

J.S.Bachs Orgelwerke. 4 vol. 1912-1914-American edition, in collaboration with uharles-Marie Widor.

1st five volumes published* New York: G. Schirmer, 1913.

Die runde Violinbogen. 7 pp.(from Schweizerische Musikzeitung, no.6, 1933)

b. Philosophy:

Die Religionsphilosophie Kants von der Kritik der r.einen Vernunft bis zur Religion innerhalb der blossen Vernunft. 325pp.

Freiburg i/B: J.C.B.Motor (Paul Siebeck), 1899. (This was Schweitzer's Ph.D. thesis).

Die Philosophie und die allgemeine Bildung des.!9.Jahrhunderts.(in Das 19. Jahrhundert, 24 Aufsatze zur Jahrhundertwende)pp.61-68. Strassburg, 1900.

Kulturphilosophie (The Philosophy of Civilisation):

I. Verfall und Wiederaufbau der Kultur. 65pp.Minchen: C.H.Beck; Bern: Paul Haupt, 1923.The Decay and Restoration of Uivilisation(Eng.tr.by C.T.Campion).

London: A. & C. Black, 1923(also translated into Swedish, Dutch, and Danish).

1S7

II. Kultur und Ethik. 230pp.Mlinchen: C.H.Beck; Bern: Paul Haupt, 1923.

civilisation and Ethics (Eng.tr.by C.T.Campion). 285pp. London: A. & C. Black, 1923.

A third volume, entitled Reverence for Life is expected to be published in the summer of 1948.

Geethe Gedehkrede. 51pp. Munchen: C.H.Beck, 1932. (an English translation appeared in the Hibbert Journal).

Die Weltanschauung der indischen Denker. Mystik und Ethik. 195pp.Mttnchen: C.H.Beck, 1935.

Indian Thought and Its Development (Eng.tr.by Mrs.C.E.B.Russell).£65PP«London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936.

c. Theology:

Das Abendmahl im Zusammenhang mit dem Leben Jesu und der Geschichte des Urchristentums.

I. Das Abendmahlsproblem auf Grund der wissenschaftlichen Forschung des 19.Jahrhunderts und der historischen Berichte. 62pp.

Tubingen: J.C.B.Mohr, 1901.II. Das Messianitats- und Leidensgeheimnis. Eine Skizze des Lebens

Jesu. 10-; pp.Tttbingen: J.C.B.Mohr, 1901.

The Mystery of the Kingdom of God. (Eng.tr.by Walter Lowrie) 275PP« London: A.& C.Black, 1915.

Von Reimarus zu Wrede. Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung. 418pp.Tubingen: J.C.B.Mohr, 1906.

The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Eng.tr.by »Y.Montgomery/ ,401pp.London: A.&.C.Black, 1910.

Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung. (2nd.enlarged edition).642pp,Ttibingen: J.C.B.Mohr, 1913.

Geschichte der Paulinischen Forschung.Tubingen: J.C.B.Mohr, 1911.

Paul and his Interpreters, (l ng.tr.by w. Montgomery).London: A.& C.Black, 1912.

Das Christentum und die VYeltreligionen. 59pp.Mnchen: C.H.Beck; Bern: Paul Haupt, 1924.

Christianity and the Religions of the World.(Eng.tr.by J.Powers) 86pp.London: Alien & Unwin, 1923*

Die Mystik des Apostels Paulus. 405pp.Tubingen: J.C.B.Mohr, 1930.

The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. (Eng.tr.by ^.Montgomery) 406pp,London: A.& C.Black, 1931.

d. Medicine:

Die psychiatrische Beurteilung Jesu. Darstellung und Kritik. 46pp. Tttbingen: J.C.B.Mohr, 1913-

e. Missions:

Zwischen Wasser und Urwald. grlebnisse und Beobachtungen eimes ArzteT'im Urwalde Xquatorialafrikas. 154pp.

Mttnbhen: C.H.Beck; Bern: Paul Haupt, 1921.On the Edge of the Primeval Forest. (Eng.tr. by C.T. Campion). l?6pp.

London: A.fr C. Black, 1922.

Mitteilung^kus Lambarene. 3 vol. 23&PP-Mttnchen: C.H.Beck; Bern: Paul Haupt, 1925-1928.

More from the Primeval Forest (Eng.tr. by u.T. Campion) 169pp.London: A.& C. Black, 1931.

The Forest Hospitalqat Lambarene (Amer.ed.)New York: Henry Holt,

3$Lambarenebrief e » Afrikanische Geschichte.

Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1936. Afrikanische Jagdgeschichte . l6pp .

Strasbourg: Editions des Sources, 1936. From My African Notebook. (Eng.tr. by Mrs.C.E.B.RussellO 132pp.

London: Alien & Unwin, 1938.

f. Autobiography:

Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit. 64pp.Mtlnchen: C.H.Beck; Bern: Paul Haupt, 1923.

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth. (Ebg.tr. by u.T. Campion) 103pp.London: Alien & Unwin, 1924.

Selbstdarstellung . 43pp.Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1929.

Aus Meinea Leben und Denken. 23&pp.Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1932.

My Life and Thought. (Eng.tr. by C.T. Campion). 283pp.London: Alien & Unwin, 1933.

Out of my Life and Thoufeht. (Amer.ed.)New York: Henry Holt.

(Note:- The above list :is made chiefly from footnotes and biblio­ graphies of books dealing with Schweitzer. It includes only those works which have been published separately. It does not even attempt to list the many magazine articles from Schweitzer' s pen, most of them dealing with musical subjects. A fairly complete list can be found in Mrs. Russell's The Path to Reconstruction.)

2. Books and articles about Schweitzer:

a. Books:

Campion, U.T.: Albert Schweitzer, some biographical notes. 31pp. London: A,& C. Black, 1928,

Hagedorn, Herman: Prophet in the Wilderness, the Story of Albert Schweitzer. 221pp.

New York: The Macmillan Co., 1947.

Joy, Charles R., ed.: Albefc6 Schweitzer, an Anthology, 323pp. New York: Harper & Bros.; Boston: Beacon Press, 1947-

Kraus, Oskar: Albert Schweitzer, sein Werk und seine Weltanschauung. Albert Schweitzer; His Work and His Philosophy (Sng.tr. by E. G7

McCalman). x,75pp.London: A?& C. Black, 1944.

Raab, Karl: Albert Schweitzer: Persftilichkeit und Denken. vi,97pp* Dtlsseldorf: G.H.Nolte, 1937.

Ratter, Magnus C.:Albert Schweitzer. 260pp. London: Allenson & Co., n.d.( early 1930 's).

The Tenfold Reverence. 0 Clouds Unfold. 55pp.

Bawtenstall (Lanes.): The Free Press. (n.d.)

Regester, Prof. John D.: Albert Scfaweitzer, the Man and His .dork. 137pp. York: The Abingdon Press, 1931

Roback, A. A., ed.: Albert Schweitzer Jubilee Book. New York (a limited edition) 1946.

Russell, Mrs. Lillian M. : The Path to Reconstruction. xii,68pp. London: A.& C. Black, 1941.

Seaver, George: Albert Schweitzer: Christian Revolutionary. 130pp. New York: Harper & Bros., 1944.

Albert Schweitzer: the Man and His Mind. 346pp. New York: Harper & Bros.; London: A.& C. Black, 1947.

b. Articles:

Barthel, &rnst: Albert Schweitzer als Theologe.in Theologische Studien und Kritiken, 1926 (3/4 Heft), pp. 445-462

Albert Schweitzer as Theologian. (Eng.tr.) in Hibbert Journal . July 1928, pp. 720-735-

Burkitet, if. C.: The Eschatologicai Idea in the liospels. in H.B.Swete's Cambridge Biblical Essays, pp. 195-213.

London: the Macmillan Co., 1909.

190

Davis, S: Schweitzer's Moral Theories. in Holborn Review, July, 1927, pp. 344-3 53.

rulton, Wm. : Life and Work of Dr. Albert Schweitzer. in Kxpository Times, May, 1932, pp. 3 54-

Uardner, Percy: Albert Schweitzer (a biographical sketch). in Modern churchman. May, 1933, pp. 74-7*.

Hayes, Paul G.: Lover of God and Man.in Chinese Record, February, 1933, pp. 85-90.

Lambert, John C.: A New Explanation of the Lord' s Supper. in Expository Times, oune, 1902, pp. 393-401.

Ross, Emory; r Schweitzer, Man of Action. * in Christian Century, January, 1948, pp. 9-11.

Royden, Maude: Albert Schweitzer. in Great Contemporaries, pp. 371-381.

London: Cassell 4 Co., 1931.

Sanday, William: The Apocalyptic Element in the Gospels. in Hibbert Journal, October, 1911, op. 83-109. .

Selbie, W.tJ. : Albert Schweitzer.in Expository Times, March, 1923, pp. 256-259.

Tasker, J.G.: The Problem of the Lord's Supper. in Expository Times, August, 1902, pp. 503- 50 5.

Turner, Vincent: Albert Schweitzer, His Work and His Philosophy. in Dublin Review, July, 1944, pp. 62-69.

(Note:- thekbove list is only a sample of the many articles which, have appeared from time to time about Schweitzer.)

3. General works consulted:

Baiilife, Donald: God was in Christ. 213pp. London: Faber & Baber, 1943.

Bultmann, Rudolph: Die Geschichte der Synoptischejft Tradition. Gttttingen: 1921, 2nd ed., 1931.

Die Erforschung der synoptischen Evangelien. Giessen: 1930

Jesus.Jesus and the Vford. (Eng.tr, by Smith and

«BSS) xi,226pp.London: Ivor Nicholspn & Watson, 1935-

191

Burkitt; F. C.: The Gospel History and its Transmission, viii,360pp. Edinburgh: T.& T.Clark, 1906

Cadoux, C. J.: The Historic Mission of Jesus. xxiv,376pp. London: Lutterworth Press, 1944.

Charles, R. H.; A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, x,428pp.

London: A.& C.Black, 1899.

Dibelius, Martin: Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums. 1919-From Tradition to Gospel (Bng.tr.by B.L.Woolf)

xv, 311pp.London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1934.

Die Botschaft von Jesus Christus. viii,l69pp. Ttlbingen: J.C.B.Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1935

The Message of Jesus (Eng.tr.by F.C.G.),xx,192pp. London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1939-

Dobschtltz, Ernst von: The Eschatology of the Gospels. viii,207pp. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910.

I

Dodd, C.H.: The Parables of the Kingdom. 214pp. London: Nisbet & Co., 1936.

The Apostolic Preaching and its Development, vii,240pp. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 19367

History and the Gospel. 189pp. London: Nisbet & Co., 1938.

Duncan, G.S.: Jesus the Son of Man, xvi,290pp. London: Nisbet & Co., 1947.

Easton, B.8.: The Gospel before the Gospels. iii,170pp. London: Alien & Unwin, 1928.

Holtzmann, H.J.: Das Messianische Bewmsstsein Jesu. Tttbingen: J.C.B.Mohr, 1907.

Hoskyns, E. & Davey, N.: The Riddle of the New Testament. 322pp. London: Faber & Faber, 1931.

Leckie, J. H.: The World to Come and Final Destiny. xv,362pp. Edinburgh: T.& T.Clark, 1922.

Manson, T.W.: The Teaching of Jesus, xi,347pp.Cambridge: University Press, 1931.

Major, H.D.A., Manson, T.W., & bright, C.J,: The Mission and Mes­ sage of Jesus, xxxi, 966pp.

London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1937.

192

Manson, W: Christ's View of the Kingdom of God. 192pp. London: James Clarke & Co., 1913.

Jesus the Messiah. 267pp« Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1946.

Niebuhr, R.: An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. 256pp. London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1936.

Otto, R.: Reichgottes und Menschensohn. vii,34#pp. Munchen: C.H.Beck, 1934.

The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man. (Eng.tr.by F.V. Filson & B.L.Woolf). 406pp.

London: The Lutterworth Press, 1938.

Robertson, J.M,: A Short History of Christianity, xii,429pp. London: Watts & Co., 1902.

Rowley,H.H.: The Relevance of Apocalyptic. 192pp. London: The Lutterworth Press, 1944.

Sanday, Win.: The Life of Christ in Recent Research. vii,32Spp. Oxford: The Clareddon Press, 1907.

Scott, E.F.: The Kingdom and the Messiah. viii,26lpp. Edinburgh: T.& T.Clark, 1911.

The Validity of the Gospel Record. vii,213pp. London: Nicholson & Watson, 193#.

Streeter, B.H.: The Four Gospels; A Study of (Drigins. xvi,624pp. London: Macmillan & Co., 1926.

Taylor, Vincent: The Formation of the Gospel Tradition, vlii,214pp. London: The Macmillan Co., 1933.

Tyrrell, George: Christianity at the Cross Roads, xxii,282pp. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909-